It’s cold in here. Dog-barks roll down through the woods and smoke in my skull.

I get out of bed, carry myself to the kitchen, and make coffee. Going every which way in the joints, I sit in front of the computer.

I spend much of the morning complaining to two friends. They seem to understand what I say. They are a dying breed, and they live hundreds of miles away. Why do they listen to this crap?

I stump around the kitchen rounding up my jacket and shoes. Outside it’s chilly and overcast. The ash and poplar at the head of the driveway are gray skeletons. Blue jays are screeching about nothing from the branches.

I walk down the driveway. It is exactly one-tenth of a mile from the house to the mailbox on the road. On the way I tell myself about at least six things I wish were different in my life.

At the road, a tractor-trailer truck roars past trying to blow me down the embankment. I keep my footing. I pull the newspaper out of the tube box, and two magazines and an AARP flier out of the mailbox. No one at our house ordered these magazines or reads them.

I walk like a pile of dishes back down the driveway with my hands shoved in my pockets and the papers tucked under my arm.

I stop by the brook and peer into the woods. The ground is carpeted with copper-colored oak and maple leaves. From the left comes a faint, restless rustling, 60 or 70 feet in among the trees. I stare between the trunks as far as I can. The ground is a sea of leaf-covered waves and troughs. Here and there a gray boulder. Not a bird. Not a squirrel. Not a deer. Nothing.

A thousand years ago Wabanakis walked through these woods, talking in ancient languages. They saw the same maples and oaks, cedars, birches, and fallen leaves. I do not see what they saw. They’re quiet.

I walk briskly, for so slow a thing, back toward the house. Two huge old pines, a huge oak and a huge red maple loom on the right. Every morning for years and years they’ve loomed there, waiting for something to happen in their favor.

The heating unit outside the house is humming. I stop to watch it. I hope it will last the winter.

Blue jays are picking at the bird feeder in the spruce tree. This feeder hasn’t been disassembled by raccoons in months, that’s a plus.

Inside, I drop the papers on the kitchen table. I take off my jacket and hang it on a chair. On the back step, blue jays are stealing morsels out of the cats’ dish. Beautiful bright blue nasty-ass angels. Azure asuras. Loud-mouthed occidental tourists.

That’s a little better. Despite being bullies, the blue jays almost always have a good word.

I sit in front of the computer. From atop a stack of books Edgar Allan Poe peers skeptically past my right shoulder. Is there something the dead are keeping back?

Eureka! Words live.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy. His writings on Maine’s natural world are collected in “The Other End of the Driveway,” available from online booksellers or by contacting the author at naturalist@dwildepress.net. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.

Copy the Story Link