An excerpt from today:
I'm sitting in my car on a very windy cold day looking out over the grey river at Fabyan Forest Park.
I have just run errands and the last one is the library.
The snow has been gone for so long- it's hard to imagine the woods with it. I can still it see somewhere in my mind- white, grey and blue.
The clouds above the line of trees on the opposite bank take on a purple grey color and I wonder if it's because of the brown trees below?
A mass of trees always put an aura in the air around it. Always, a sort of mist hangs around it even though it is no mist at all. It is just the different height of branches and twigs all delicately interlaced in the sky. So now the clouds are purple instead of merely just grey due to these brown interweavings.
And there's the tiniest big of purple in the river because the river always reflects the clouds. The color of purple in the river is so faint, you wouldn't notice it if you didn't see the trees touching the clouds into color.
I feel like I could go on forever about the trees, sky and river. A thousand years could go by and I wouldn't say it all. Not at all.
Can I know this place? If I moved away would it gain clarity and grow starbright? Or would it writhe and glower in my mind and become hidden in homesickness. This place did both when I was away in college. It gave me my best essay and it scored my heart with a hundred missing cuts and bruises. The lakes of Minnesota did nothing to satiate the need of this particular river and forest.
Why does a place do that? This place has memories in my mind from childhood but the memories are like dreams and I've never been sure if I went here with my parents and aunt or if I dreamed that I did, over and over as a child.
I am here now and I'm still not sure of those memories. I am simply glad to be here.