Nature Essay
The snow isn’t a deterrent at Old Mission Harbor on Haserot Beach today. Its whiteness erases the cracks in the sidewalk, and steam rises up out of the bay where the air is warmer than the water. I am alone on this beach, walking on a sidewalk from which the summer visitors are all gone. The mist rolls in, the color of dust, and hovers an inch or two above the water’s edge as if deciding: take the plunge or don’t.
I am a solitary walker, a lone woman on the sand, the raucous calls of the children long gone from summer, and even the gulls, loud, raucous residents in warm weather, are only an echo in my mind a month ago, when they shrieked and cawed like old crows. I think they are related, gulls and crows, from a thousand years of loud long families that have been here since before we came. I was born to a quiet family, one in which the hushed word was intoned over the loud, mostly to allow adults to speak and not children. And so, these crows seem like happy conversations to me, ones that my Brooklyn-born husband would like: strong, vigorous debate, and yes, loud, for life is to be lived, not sat quietly under.
And yet it is the “under” parts of things that I explore with vigor: the quiet lick of the water on the legs of the pier, the wind when it spreads its wings and touches every light thing, the branches with no leaves on them, the creak of the swing with no children on it, the long reeds of knee-high grass that rustle all the gossip they know. And even the stark summer houses talk, too, the boards that cover their windows, creaking as the wind sweeps past, the scrape-scrape of a shutter swinging in the wind by one nail.
Where did they all go, these people? Was there a hand that beckoned them to run, fly, for winter was coming? Did their children run for fun, and their parents go after and never come back?
Ah, but no. It is only the wind of winter that makes all things fly before the wind.