The cabin is quiet. Summer things have been put away. The refrigerator stands with its door wide open. The gas has been turned off. At wide intervals I hear a boat going by, but there are precious few. Even the birds have gone.I am here to clear brush-or that is my excuse. We try not to cut the brush during the season, because so many nests would be disrupted. By mid-September that problem is gone, and I need to clean up.
When the fire hazard is high, I do not want the cabin surrounded by thick, flammable brush.
So, the next two days I will trim, and in the evenings I will burn the slash.
Today the sun is brilliant, and the temperature is in the high seventies. September days like this mock our human schedules.
We are already back to work, back to school, back to the city-but this is still summer! There were some nasty days in June I would gladly have traded for a day like this one.
Serene as it is, there is something missing from this ësummerí September day. Without Barb, without the children, there is a hollowness to this natural beauty that I cannot quite wish away. I am afraid I would not make much of a hermit.
I hear a soft gasping sound out in the river. Two otters round the point, craning their necks in a peculiar way above the surface of the water, to see my fire.
High, high overhead I can pick up the gabbling of thirty or more snow geese, heading south in a great, wavering vee.
The vee modulates between having the vertex at the front (^), and then at the right side (>) of the formation. I close my eyes and try to imagine the beauty of the world they can see from up there. Can they see all the way to next spring?
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