This part
of the woods is unfamiliar. Its edge is the kind of place that looks like it’s
going to open up into a strange city, with light the color of another world
entirely. I wonder if you know what I mean. I can remember another such place,
a woods of pine trees in symmetry and then---expansion. Or what felt like it
was going to be. In reality a little clearing existed there, and within it a
small grotto that seemed to belong in a fairy tale. I could sometimes hear
water running there if I paid attention and we weren’t in the middle of a dry
spell.
The
edges of this place claim a part of my soul that is afraid to step into its
light. I’ve been told there is a river just beyond the sweep of trees. Not a
city but running water, alive and wild. Dizzy with imagined possibility, I hang
around in hiking boots, feet clad in leather watertight and unsuitable for
toeing the edges of rivers. I keep thinking I’ll go beyond the place where I
always stop, someday. I’ll just keep walking over the little ridge and there
will be the moving water that will tell me something I’ve always needed to
know. It will want me to learn its language. It won’t be scared, even though I
might be. I’ll be wearing tough-girl Tevas and I will sit on the bank of the
river and let my feet find the flowing coolness below me. I’ll sit there with
the eddies of the river around my toes and the tops of my feet, remembering the
pine-woods grotto and its delicate underwater voice, tracing new places in
clay.
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