Evening Walk

At odd moments, it strikes me that I love this place. When I crest a hill on my way to the next town in the evening and golden light drapes over the road and trees and the edges of clouds, I sit in the feeling. When the pale pinks and blues of sunset catch my eye as I rush to make dinner, I step out onto the porch’s patchy planks and watch the clouds lift. When the full moon lights up the shifting mists in the middle of the night, I watch branches emerge and hide again and imagine night animals striding through the haze.

Here, getting the mail can be an adventure of over an hour, if you so choose. You could hop in the car and drive to the paved road in five minutes, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, I trek down one hill and up the next, chat with my dad in the mid-renovation house that used to be my great-grandma’s, and remark on the daffodils spreading down her bank and along the old road first carved with a donkey so many decades ago. The daffodils, a decade abandoned, pierce the ground down the slope, under the stairs by bits of broken pipe, and spread some stalks to the center of the pitted old road now covered with grass.

I mark pictures of quiet beauty between steps. Here, a cleared swatch stretches down the ridge and up a small slope to the old trailer. The broken tooth of a tree juts out halfway down, and electrical lines swoop overhead to a post down below. Here, beyond a burn pile of branches and pine boughs, an old shed crouches at the foot of a tree that, in the fall, wore a crown of gold leaves right at the very top. Here, past the stream that runs through a culvert under the path, a tree has fallen. The gnarled heap of the stump clings to the trunk with only a curved strain of inner wood. Dry kudzu vines drape the hump and the branches curve off into the brush.

I crunch up the gravel, never reaching the paved road. Check the mailbox, swing around the neighbors’ gate, past their front porch, and across the stream. The old mill house stands on one side, the old school house on the other. The mill wheel is gone, but birds flutter below the old trough that carried water to the wheel’s peak. Up Charlie’s Road, named for a family member, I can’t remember which, droplets drip gently along my back and on my face. By the time I reach gravel again, the sickly stench of drying wood joins the fresh rain.

There is no sound but the drone of a distant plane against the low ceiling of the sky and the laboring thud of my heart as I take the last bend. This forest is quiet. These slopes swallow some sounds and echo others, tossing them up and around the natural bowls of earth. This place expects nothing at all of you. You are both observer and participant, however small.