Autumn days

I wandered in a mental Autumn haze under blue skies and dotted clouds on a warm day of reminders that life is always open to the senses and the deepest yearnings of a man still seeking, still restless, far past the days of his youth. He clings to remembrance of past days of Autumn, his recollections of golden, slanted sunlight on barns and fields, fencepost wood, gray and weathered as the countryside. Long years ago, and just last week.

Yesterday, no one was there. I was alone, it seemed, in all that 300-acre natural area, that sanctuary of swamp and marsh and waterfowl wetlands, along the former rice field canals and open places, so attractive to egrets, herons, cormorants, hawks, eagles, vultures, belted kingfishers…
The sky and landscape had that eternal, steady, forgiving appearance of calm. Primordial, awe-inspiring, and yet delicately painterly, puffs of white then streaks and d patterns too lovely for words as those clouds played in the sky and dreamed their own dreams.

As usual, I lingered below on the grassy trail looking up in an attemp to discern their meaning. Clouds speak, you see. They are visible, yet invisible. Awake and asleep. Like me. I could gaze at clouds all day, for like snowflakes, they are never the same, they change by the second and become something else, newer meanings, other pleasing shapes and gossamer caravans, gone when next I look up. “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” said Wordsworth.

I couldn’t understand the reason for my being the only one there on a perfect Fall day. The season’s last crickets buzzed in dry, crackly grasses by the water, near the ragweed and pollen factories that caused me to sneeze. Crickets — the least little singing recollections of the summer just past. Sounds fortifying a motionless wind. Past prime, the land’s inhabitants were readying themselves for the winter season approaching. A dead butterfly. No dragonflies darting about in summer bliss. Woods thinning. Leaves beginning to fall.

I sat on a bench overlooking the wetlands and watched hawks soar and dart quickly away. Then I saw the spectacularly large wingspan in my binoculars. I watched the gliding, soaring bird fly directly overhead. It must have been. It had to be. The beak. The larger head. The long, outstretched feathered finger tips. There are bald eagles here. It must be them. Two of them. Soaring fast and slow, away from me, higher and higher. It could have been turkey vultures, too. How maddening not to know for sure. Brave, majestic eagles, symbol of freedom, or the vulture, less savory. Ugly up close. But in the sky, they shed their other limitations. Especially if we don’t know. Who knows? What does it matter? They all belong here. They are the sky’s own creatures, upheld by the gentle, non-judgmental hands of the wind.

I am startled by the sound of rushing wings and a low diving bird. I think maybe it is an osprey. I heard the squawking sound they make, so surprising coming from a creature of such beauty, as I never cease to note. Why? Again, what does it matter?

In the shallows on the other side of the dike, more egrets and long-beaked wading birds plucking feathers and mud in more eternal rituals of the wild. Oblivious to me a short distance away, marveling at their ruffled feathers and communal gathering.

On the hard bench, feet and legs propped up, dozing off, rather uncomfortably in the sun, hardly able to keep my eyes open. The great eagle/vultures rise and hover over the marsh a hundred, two hundred yards away, then alight after making small circles, like a dog or cat fluffing down its bedding by circling and fussing over it until it is just right.

I get up to leave and the clouds have re-arranged themselves again, swirling, layering, complicating the patches of blue. I like it that way. Complex. Mysterious.

As far as I can see across the fields and to the woods, no other person. Just myself, the birds, the insects, the wind, crickets, squirrels in the woods on the trail back to the car, and time away from time.