behindtheax

Wednesday's Journal

I can’t believe this but there is no card in my camera. After walking five kilometers and finding this perfect park right on the bluffs and then looking down onto the lake and finding it to be this unbelievable emerald colour with a hundred swallows flitting about like little black and white aerial dancers, and I can't even take one picture.

It smells like country here. I’m sitting in the shade of a huge spruce tree. It towers above me and is gorgeous. Or should I say she is gorgeous because she feels like a she – her long skirt makes a perfect circle around her hidden trunk. If I crawl towards her trunk, beneath her bottom layer where the ground is brown and bath towel thick with her old needles, I could easily stand up and even do jumping jacks inside there without touching a branch. But there are people walking along the paths a little ways off so I won’t do that but if I did her broad boughs would hide me completely from everyone.
The sun is behind her but she is letting bits of it through to shine on her tangle of bare inner branches, letting it skip and glint off of strands of silver web that seems to decorate almost every level of her inner sanctum and finally letting this light slide through her heavy laden arms of green to rest in bright sweetened strips. On the ends of many of her fingers she wears what looks like a small brown transparent thimble and when I easily slip one off it produces a gift of new jade green needles, which feel just like the teeth of a soft rubber comb. Every tip of her hold a tiny bit of this new. I liked her immediately because she offered me shade – I like her even more now, which is five minutes later, because she gave me something to write about.

There is an older man wearing a brown turban and a dark red shirt sitting almost lotus like beneath a twisted pine tree. He is reading a book and looks very content. His shoes sit neatly beside him and a large white Zellar’s bag sits next to the trunk. I wonder if he likes his tree as much as I like mine? Between us is a lilac bush; its purple flowers are swollen to bursting. A lot of its blossoms are already gone. The sky is pale blue. Not a cloud but birds are everywhere, flying low over the grass, high over the trees, even a small bird of prey dives and retreats. Five starlings kept me company for a few minutes complaining loudly to each other about something (probably about me) but they flew off. It is so nice here, I wish I could stay longer – I brought a book – I think I will finish up reading Chekhov’s, “a boring Story” before I head back home. It's my birthday today and Greg had giving me a book, called Mastering digital photography - i guess the first chapter might tell me that I can't master much if i keep forgetting the G D card.

posted by mary j. @ 6:34 PM