Between the Bridges

Today is a day of hope. After periods of intense heat and humidity, days and nights of severe storms and floods, and before that wildfires flaring without warning in the parched woodlands, we have a day of clear skies, gentle breezes, and a warmth that caresses us instead of beating us down. Today is a generous example of what out world can be.

This is a day that summoned me to the water. Today, I did not feel strong enough to paddle on the nearby lake, the one I described in my last blog, so I left the builders and the boaters to enjoy their dreams while I pursued mine. Since Sunday, I have felt an overwhelming need to meander along the wetlands above the little bridge a few miles along the road. With surprising ease, the kayak slid over the bushes and down the embankment to the river's edge.

The water was high but contained by the wetlands, and my water trail was well-defined. My course upstream appeared near, but the river brought me on a long, meandering paddle, turning many times before I reached my path upstream. Patience, the river urged, for there are trees to gaze at, waterlilies to touch, dragonflies to follow, and lessons to be learned. Patience, for the morning requires your surrender.

Two Mergansers joined me briefly as I paddled, and I recalled this time of year at the cabin, when the ducklings would swim across the cove each evening, proud behind their parent as they churned their way to the creek. The water was up today, and we crossed the beaver dam without portage. Dragonflies flitted and hovered, as they had during my Amarok's last summer, as they had on the day she died out there at the cabin, seventeen but filled with the aura of a life well-lived. The dragonflies dazzled me this day as they recalled her to me. A third duck swam near, but as I approached, it scurried off into the thickets along the shore, like my lady, my Husky, swimming free at my side. My past came into my present. 

The journey passed like a dream until I awakened at the shallow rapids below the second bridge. Mere moments had passed, but I was there, past my goal. 

Returning, the current carried me. A lone deer stood poised behind a sapling at the water's edge. As my kayak drifted near, the deer emitted a sudden snort, then a series of hoarse barks as she dashed for the wood. There was too much thrashing in the woods for one; she was teaching her young, it seems. 

The sun warmed but did not burn. The dull sweetness of ripening meadow hay was thick in the air, recalling the taste of stale marshmallow. The edge of the wetland was rich with the energy of earth's decay and renewal. The pungent odor pulsed over the waters.

Time stopped.

There between the bridges, there on the wetland, Nature remains in perfect balance. Each moment speeds by, yet each moment lasts forever. It extends beyond time in the eternal present of memory.

The moment between the bridges holds me; when all beauty comes crashing down, when darkness covers me, this is the moment that will breathe life into me.

There between the bridges  rests all I need of paradise. 

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