Was it the summer of 1995 when I first discovered the world of pastiche colors? The summer when my son David left on a bicycle road trip and I found the small stone circle he and his friends had built in the woods beside my home?
I think it was. I had not yet connected with Denise and Seeker. It was the summer she initiated the magazine, and David spent a good share of two months at Mike and Denise's, helping them move and connecting with his own road.
Yes, it was 1995, because I already knew about the circle on the day of my 47th birthday when my granddaughter was not quite a month old. On the way home from a birthday celebration, right after David had returned, my car struck and killed a great horned owl. My children and I buried it within a triangle of pines beside the stone circle.
That summer I discovered that my near-sighted eyes could create magic. Odd that it took me forty years to see it. I sat in the circle one morning and took my glasses off and caught the effect of sunbeams streaking the leaves on a myriad of maple saplings — really twiglings — that were fifteen feet tall. A hundred shades of green blossomed in patches.
I found that myopic vision brings me a fantastic landscape when I wish it.
Today (and yesterday) I come to the long, horizontal boulder at the edge of another maple woods — a sugarbush — and a cornstalk-stubbled field. I think of it as a listening point and have done so every since I discovered it about twenty years ago. Sitting there, I look down into a wide vale of maples, its floor a carpet of ferns. A forester I know says nearly every specie of fern that grows in Vermont can be found in this little valley.
Today the listening point is aptly named because — for the first time not on a recording — I hear a barred owl hooting, at four o'clock in the afternoon, no less. It hoots four separate times. I don't think it is an impersonator, although there is much human action here today. Two fellows rattling around a little to the south pop off a bullet at something. That's when my sister and I start talking loudly to let them know there are other humans around. A while later, loud crashing noises finally resolve into a bicyclist, not a bear, beating a path through the ferns. Later he and another walk their bikes back up the trail to the cornfield.
A nuthatch, a woodpecker loud enough to be a hairy, blue jays softly calling to each other, and a few sparrows announce themselves, but yesterday's adventurous red squirrel doesn't appear. A gray squirrel hauls a leftover ear of corn onto a rock and chews away.
The air has a dryness with a hint of moldering leaves. The sun slants long. Enough chlorophyll has died to turn the light more golden under the leaves.
This morning the hills have become a true patchwork of reds, golds, and yellows, with some bare-limbed trees foretelling the future. Soon these leaves will fall and left will be the old gold of the deciduous tamarack and the last of the aspen leaves. Then will come a day when rusts and grays remain to color the landscape of this northern New England countryside. November will arrive.