At almost 89 years, Dad just keeps waking up every morning, day after day after day. His t-shirt garment tops are too tight around the neck and try to strangle him in his sleep, so he sleeps without a top now, or a bottom. Life is simpler that way. Mom pulls the shower door closed regularly at 8:00 AM with a bang which I have learned is not a body falling to the floor. This morning, I needed to escape the comfortable incarceration of home to seek beauty on nature’s trails. That seems to be my life’s aspirational pursuit: finding beauty. The twisted canyon where two glaciers once ground away at each other seemed unusually lush. On their steep meadows, cut gently by a meandering snowmelt stream, the wildflowers grew in excess of three feet tall, all of them: yellow-flowered strawberry, white columbine, lavender lupine, sticky geranium, both the pink and the white, firecracker penstemon, powdery blue bells, the unfortunately named beard tongue, larkspur, paintbrush, sweet pea, catnip, purple and yellow daisies, and blue flax. On this day’s journey to Desolation Lake, I climbed one slow step after another, steady. One just keeps going, on and on, up and up. Pretty middle-aged faces passed me, in both directions, and I said Hello to each, and each became the last in a long, knotted thread of lost opportunities to connect with another human being, for my lack of skill and courage. At the lake, feeling very tired, I stopped and sat on a log, for there is nothing wrong with stopping to rest on one’s journey. A small flock of hairy woodpeckers, almost a foot long each, graced me by landing in the ponderosa pines and quaking aspens, very near to me—one of them looked over at me, I am sure—and hammered at the trunks in rapid staccato. I wondered if the dasher’s one-hundredth-of-a-second stopwatch would still tick too slowly to measure the motions of these birds. They flew off, and I moved on to the mountain’s descent, not without growing pain from a swelling Achilles tendon. Never without pain on these trails, never without loss, and grief, all wrapped up in tenderness and love and the beauty of wildflowers and butterfly wings and birdsong and the burbling of water over rocks. Mr. Rogers and Kermit the Frog both have taught me that every ending is a new beginning, that every good-bye points to the next reunion. Forever. When does a story find its end? How does a writer know when to put down the pen? When, perhaps, it is springtime in the Rockies, and the swallowtails fly very close and bob their hello, and the stands of bluebells and columbines waive their petals against the canvas, and a bird I have not met sends her voice to echo through the trees with the loose embouchure air of a reedy flute.
Rabbit Lane 