MindSpinner

Fortunately, sent mail on my ISP’s server was restored to me when I set up my computer again. Last night I discovered two photographs I thought lost - I had emailed them to friends. They aren’t suitable for printing. They exist now only in a reduced state for use on the Web, but they are something that remains.

At Shaker Village, to reach the trail that winds to the river among the wildflowers, you have to venture through a field past these two magnificent fellows. At a distance, this seems a test of your mettle, but when you are nearer, you realize that they mind you not at all.

Among the many shots of wildflowers I took along the trail was this one, of wild phlox. It was my favorite, and I’m glad to see it again.

Beyond the stacked stone fence, the last field, and the algae-clogged pond with its ducks, we found a place that held a kind of magic for me. If E and I had been children together, it would have been our secret place. (Even if we had known each other forty years ago, we would not have been children together, for seven years separate us. He would have been Science Boy, and I would have tagged along to see what he was up to, making a nuisance of my smaller self ;->. I think, though, that he would have tolerated me. But sometimes we can be children together anyway because the children we were are still a part of us now.)

To the left of the trail, there was a stone chimney, partly fallen, that once served as the hearth in a cabin or a house now long disappeared. The house had been replaced by a tree that grew with several trunks and arching branches, along with all her seedling children, to form a grove. From without, the wonder place looked like an abandoned chimney at the edge of a tangle of trees, but when we entered the grove, as I knew I must, the limbs and trunks made another sort of house under the mother tree. The branches formed arching doorways out into light in every direction and a place of quiet, without walls.

This, too, I tried to capture with photographs. I could take a picture of the chimney from within and without, and I did. I could take pictures of the dance of leaves and light, ever moving in a sea of air, and I did, though I only stilled the dance. I could take pictures of the mother tree and even of her bark, which seem to flow in twining rivers down her various trunks, into her roots. I could take pictures of her several doorways, and each resulting shot did indeed invite passage. But I could not take pictures of all around and up above and forest floor at once, as I would have had to do to recreate what it was to be in that place. So the loss of these photographs is not so much a loss, and words will do - or not do - as well.

I can’t quite explain the draw of the chimneyed grove. It seemed somehow sacred, and its sacredness seemed far older than this chimney or those trees. Its discovery was, at the least, part of the gift of a day spent, as E would put it, “down the rabbit hole,” escaped to a world apart.