The Path Through The Woods

It starts at the base of the giant old big-leaf maple, a narrow path rising to the left, overgrown in spring with thimbleberry and stinging nettles, and a wider, muddier track straight on, sloping gently down among the alders toward the bridle trails and acres of pasture a half mile on.

On the right, perhaps a hundred yards further, a steep cut makes its way fast and straight toward the lake below, the blue shimmer of its waters just barely visible through the wild banks of blackberry and the Winter’s fallen branches and snags. With work, in January this path becomes a sledding hill as it’s the best and longest run despite its obstacles and prickly edges, those of course being part of the challenge.

Another hundred yards and the main path turns right toward the back edge of the swamp, quiet now in March but thrilled through in June with tadpoles, and later frogs; dragonflies, the sharp pips of gold finches and musical trills of the red-winged blackbirds sentinelling the cattails; turtles now and then, the occasional, harmless garter snake primordially cutting through the dark water.

If you keep left though, that narrower path rejoins the first in its long semi-circle of the wood and then widens out as it heads toward the gravel road and barbed wire fences that mark a return to civilization and better kempt ways and places. 

But those are not the places of childhood, nor the empire of wild bushes and creatures that were the menagerie of my seasons and imagination when a path through the woods was an invitation for everything from bikes to bb guns, nets to capture frogs, breakneck runs on old skis and plywood through the snow, or simply a great, green place to just be, apart from everything else like it and never ending in its turns of possibilities.