These are the days that I treasure. Or at least part of the days that I treasure.
With the longer day length and the warming weather, when a sunny day stays sunny through the afternoon and I have the opportunity to have a calm (and calming) walk home on the forest trails I feel like I can breathe a little bit easier. It lifts my spirits at the end of a day stuck on non-stop virtual meetings. This doesn’t entirely make up for the back-to-back-to-back meeting insanity…..but it does let me mostly leave it behind.
The birds are happy too. In the mornings I listen to the Varied Thrush buzzing in the underbrush, sounding remarkably like a referee’s whistle. And I can hear the towhees singing “drink your tea”…., and the chickadees calling out ‘chick-a-dee-dee-dee’, and the nuthatch with its soft beeping call. I can hear the eagles chittering high in the trees above.
And I see none of them.
But I also hear the trill of the robins, and I do see them. Like this little “Worm Whisperer”. It flew down past me and landed lightly in the leaf litter a few feet to the side of me. I stopped and watched it for a few moments. It stood still, cocked its head and …listened….and then suddenly hopped forward and plunged its beak into he ground and emerged with a fat juicy worm.
Bright pops of colour are starting to spatter the gloom of the shaded edges of the forest. Salmonberry bushes are starting to put forth bright fuchsia blooms, harbingers of fat juicy berries that will follow in a few months.
And, with the perfume of Pepé Le Pew, the skunk cabbage….the bright, weird, and upright bracts looking like a yellow Peace Lily….bursting out of the ground in wet depressions.
The forest is heavy with shadow, but the afternoon light seeping through the trees highlights the bright little treasures along the trails; it has come back to life and is filled with the sounds and smells of the annual cycle of rejuvenation.