Summer's first blush

  

June 21, 2021

 Greetings from the first blush,

 I have been smiling at glimpses of Summer through the windows each morning.  Lingering in the low grass, in the first light, in the one crystalline jewel of dew. Driving around town with the windows down, I felt her there, delighting in my choice of music.  Seeing the cameo hue in the clouds at dawn, and by eternal magic, again at night.

 The warmth came on the feathers of tiny Robins on their first flight, in the mourning doves soft hymn.  The spaces in the trees closed in with green.  Miniature fawns teetered on matchstick legs between new leaves and shoots in the yard.  These were more than hints.

 A few days ago, I pushed into the Flint river in my kayak, and paddled without much ambition downstream, winding several miles outside of my little town.  It has been a long time, but the rhythm came back quickly.

I paced with dragonflies cruising along the water’s surface, felt like they were happy to see me, sometimes hitching a ride on my boat.  The water was clear so I could see the rocks and billowing seaweed. 

 I was vaguely aware of the date on the calendar, somehow connected to the sun and stars, and how it would announce the arrival of my favorite season.  But I could feel it in me already.  My morning coffee, the first sips usually in dark, were in the pale false dawn.  The daylight eased back the twilight, painted yellow ribbons on the green even before the world was ready to be awake.

 On the river I soon lost track of moments and just felt the flow of the water around me.  The blue arced over the trees, dotted with small birds, and now a heron, graceful and also outlandish, as if shuttling back to some prehistoric era.

 Along shore a dozen impossibly tiny ducklings skittered in the water, mostly hidden by the foliage there.  I was still delighted by them when suddenly there was a flurry of air and feathers and their mother crashed through the grass and into the water, squawking and splashing, wildly swimming at me.

 She was angry, her wings up as she skittered across the water at me, protecting her little brood.  I was so taken aback I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I paddled quickly away.  She chased me for far longer than I expected, close enough for me to see the wild look in her eyes.  Even this morning I am smiling at the courage, and how well her strategy worked.

 I coasted on the indifferent current, until I scraped onto some rocks and held there, rested my paddle and let everything relax for a moment.  I could feel the ebb of the river, felt it align with my pulse.  I let my mind drift back over the week.  There have been these little moments of warmth and light, filling the gray places left by winter, and even the damp spring.  I felt Summer close around me, the dampness on my skin, which is already darker from the sun.  My reverie was shaken as a fish leapt from the water in front of me, just out of the water to take an innocent victim from the swarm of gnats floating there.

 There were flowers growing in the woods near me whose names I don’t need to know.  Snowmelt from months ago fills the streams and lakes and wanders down ways made by God before we all existed and pools in small places, reflects the sky and trees.  In an invisible magic dance, it finds its way into the sky again and rains into the green and makes it greener.  It makes rivulets and creeks and ponds, and it makes this river.

I floated by people fishing, some serious, others merely using their lines to make ripples in the water.  Two men stood in a flat boat fly fishing, a graceful ballet of arcing lines, living bookends over the water.  I paddled quietly past another pair intently casting from shore, and yet another walking their boat along the shallows, talking about a wild night in a Mexican bar. 

 The river led me past small islands, kids splashing on the bank, a single deer timidly watching me from the shallows.   A choir of geese paddled to a steep edge and somehow in perfect choreography walked into the woods for some appointment none of us will know.

 Hours passed unnoticed, and I glided to a stop in a small opening in the thick growth along the shore.  Landing where I once set a leaf free, where we sent my mother’s ashes into this same river.  The kayak made the water giggle around its hull, and then eased onto the shore, and set me back onto the other earth.

 Yesterday I set off into the farmland to carve a twelve-mile rectangle in the humidity.  It seems odd to write this, but I was smiling as I walked to the end of my driveway.  I felt like I had been given a gift.  The morning stood bright and warm, a gift to me to celebrate Father’s Day, and the arrival of Summer, my friend, maybe my closest companion.

 In the time I moved along the roads, wearing mostly sweat, I pushed past the opening I was given and into Summer, into the season of ripe fruit and rich sunsets, of fireflies and thunderstorms.  I thought about moving down that river, which felt like gliding on my bike, or hiking in the woods, or this very run, all linked to being immersed in nature, in Summer. 

 This morning, watching the first light reflected in the rain pooled outside my window, I know I have been invited to another beautiful season of life.  I can’t wait. 

  

Hope this finds you living it up,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith