TREE LINES

The tree lines quiet and still while the colors have changed. They will turn more in the coming days and weeks. There is a bush or shrub, a wildflower or some such thing that creates hives and an incredible itch if the walker is foolish and brazen (as this one was), to go it alone to a strange and high summit traversed by nobody. Putting safety and common sense a far second, and comfort and fun first, I wore shorts and then shoes with no socks. I thought I would die right on that hill such were the itch and the sting and the practically alive and pulsing agony of the suddenly erupted hives. But I kept the course, and took the pictures. The dogs were happy and ran around the hillsides and sniffed here and there. Before, I had seen a strange windmill, metallic in the sky,- and now for an instant I was like the windmill,- solitary and my top, a double crowned head,- in the blue sky. A series of weird birds, I don’t know what the heck they were, - because startled and walked right out of the forest, up the hill, and then one, two, three, four, five, - like clockwork or a video game or a rehearsal for some play or dance…flew from the same spot once they got to it and disappeared in the forest on the other side. 

The place was quiet and had become a little too summery, a bit too hot. When would the

textured and cinematic sky and clouds come, announcing the pre-amble to a storm? When would there be an angry hawk, - yelling across the way, a warning of some kind of change, shift in season? - Do not enter here. Or, - Veer away from this way. Some yellow wildflowers seemed to live through the early autumn weeks and ways. Once we got down from the top and the hillsides I took of the shoes and itches and itches and itches those and the legs. If there was also a resin, an infection of some kind of ivy, - the itch would spread it everywhere. Yet,- so much was the itch that it was as if no human before or after would ever experience such a thing. So itch I did. Nothing came of it all. Inside of fifteen minutes of being out of there (though far deeper in the forest), the thing went away and the condition all but disappeared. We saw the sandpit, the few wildflowers that remain, and the bees that work diligently still at whatever they can find. That bird, quite big, - that we always annoy by our presence and send flying away until we leave I am sure. And what else? The sky, blue, a few cumulus and a solitary kind of plane you would expect to see near an island or in a movie, - a single engine affair. We went up a Ridgeway to a valley, - and though it appeared narrow and with a deep fall, we knew the way well and all had a more confident and singular energy. The canines and I are a sort of trinity, at least to ourselves if nobody else, - that moves here and there, exploring this place and then that and sometimes the other. This time the tree lines were quiet and still.

 

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