Winter Now Past

Walking 'neath bare winter trees. Pale wood/bone skeletons try to occlude pale winter sky, pixy lattice frames blazing azure above. Juxtaposition. Color. Some birds. Brightest winter light, Northeastern winter coastal sunlit. Brilliance. 40 degrees. Briny salted air, despite the fact that the majority of those un-awake and un-alive alive fail to notice their own proximity to the near hundred miles of Atlantic white-sand beaches. Pure East End winter air, unfettered by summer smog, relish it…

Anyway…

Walking—purposefully, aimlessly, forward/straight-ahead/determined. Solid ground underfoot and watching the juxtaposition of bare-winter-woods and sky.
Smoking a cigarette, (ironic after the fresh air comment no?) pondering;
‘What am I doing here these days? These same surroundings I have known since forever, but, things are different now. The surroundings seem the same about the edges, but, when I was younger everything was denser in the natural world here, the houses were farther apart, smaller, and less frequent. Now, the houses and people are much denser, and the woods are now well-thinned. Even where one finds a place seemingly untouched and natural and dense with trees and foliage, in winter the trees’ barrenness allows one to see the houses lying just behind the thin veil of tree leaves and about and back to the left and again up on the right. There is only the illusion of woods and forest now. Some pockets of Nature’s enveloping glens and folds yes but, that is all…’

You cannot escape the houses, nor can you escape the people. You can escape the nagging herds of summer, but we year rounders are now more numerous too. It is harder to be alone. There is always someone, if not in plain view, then just around the corner, or just wait a minute or two, and then someone will be by surely/shortly in a car or on foot or on a bike.
Things are different these days…

There are no longer long wide swathes of rolling hills and fields with only a few farmhouses and seemingly endless fields of potatoes or corn or fallow fields, or farmers on tractors spraying pesticides. Now, it is just houses. Houses everywhere. Some with people in them, and yet many with not a soul 6-9 months out of the year. Up little dirt-sand roads neath shady bayside lowland hills there is none other than Poof-Dooble’s house. Everywhere else. . . McMansions. McDonald's, Mc-Gucci, Mc-Quik, McCar, McPeople, McFox News, Mc Psychology, you name it they sell it.

People used to come to escape the city and it’s grind and endless people and be out here for the land and the light and the beaches and the nature and the quiet. Then, people started to come for the status instead of the nature… And now they come just for that, and so the city is here with them nearly all the time and all we see is houses, cars, and the encroach of urban and suburban sprawl. The country is now a suburb, and even on the nature trails we are only but lucky if we see not into someone else’s windows and living room and forget our place in nature.

So in winter it’s nice to pretend to be alone in nature and enjoy the absence of the summer masses and to be able to pollute the crisp winter air with an occasional whiff of tobacco smoke. The way it is during the frozen time, the locals’ time, wintertime emptiness is joy…

© 2012 Lutha Leahy-Miller