Listen, I tell myself. Don’t move. The rustle of my steps displacing fallen leaves is enough to mask squirrel chatter. Above me, high and staccato, I hear Sparrows and a Cedar Waxwing whistle. I imagine myself a statue with hypersensitive ears.
Daring myself to hold this moment and focus solely on the space around me, I fill my nostrils and lungs with the scent of bayberries and scrub pines. This is the world unchanged, a small piece of New England wood, still as lovely as I remember from childhood.
In adult life I know better than to intrude on precious fish, amphibian and bird habitat, but as a child visiting this land originally purchased by my parents for a second home, I followed my mother’s instructions. On our visits, sometimes she’d send me wearing galoshes into the wetlands to gather cattails. I’d cut their stalks with heavy scissors. Other times we’d pick wild blueberries. On the edge of the marsh, dangerously close to poison ivy, in August grew plump blackberries. I’d pick them carefully, wearing long pants and long sleeves.
A task for now, a task for the future, she trained me to keep advancing forward. To calculate while still in motion, the outcome of my actions. Achievement was the ultimate goal. But it was when I stopped, that I began to notice more.
Standing in place, looking closely at the rocks along the trail I see the patterns of lichen and moss, delicate ovals, dots, and stripes. Creamy brown toadstools, a clump of young green cranberries, the perfect geometry of fern fronds, the mitten shape of sassafras.
Above all else, my mother admired the power of the sea, the drama of the shifting tides. After her death, we scattered her ashes along the bay’s edge in the place where she loved to take me as a child clamming. Wading in the water at low tide, using our heels to find quahaugs buried in sand, we’d gather enough to make stuffed clams and chowder.
I chew and taste the bright and pungent sassafras leaf. Not blueberry season, if I am quiet and lucky, I may sight wild turkeys. At dusk I watch for deer and coyote. Perhaps I’ll ask for my ashes to be scattered in these woods and wetlands where creatures are hatched and mosses prosper, my soul singing with the birds in the trees.
This is my sanctuary.
INSTANT NOODLES 