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“Whatsoever things are . .
. lovely . . . think on these things.”
Philippians 4:8
A Walk in the
Woods
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor
Today I took a walk in the woods.
It was a splendid tonic.
I drove sixty miles to my boyhood
home in East Texas, parked the car near a clump of tickle-tongue trees, and
moseyed down the long country lane from where our barn used to be to our patch
of woods. Those woods are situated in the northwest corner of the property my
parents bought for $100 per acre about 80 years ago. That price included the
two-story, four bedroom house where I was born, a big barn, an ample shed for a
car, a wagon, tools and farm implements, a henhouse, a smokehouse, a cistern, a
well, and several remarkably fine neighbors.
But woods themselves on this
pleasant early spring day, were the locus of my ecstasy. There were black jack
oaks, post oaks, pin oaks, elms, persimmons, cedars, hickories, ash, and a big
thicket of huckleberries. The land itself was partly sandy knolls and partly
flat little glades given to retaining rainfall and domiciling crawfish.
The best thing about this walk in
the woods was not the walk, of course, but rather:
-
sitting a
spell on a fallen log encrusted with old shelf lichen, inhabited desultorily
by some unaggressive, big wood ants, mutilated by woodpeckers in search of
luscious grubs, and still partially clad by decaying slabs of bark ready, in
the fullness of time, to fall to the ground at the slightest provocation of
a scampering squirrel or a raucous bluejay;
-
kneeling on a
bed of dry leaves to brush away the winter’s accumulated detritus to find
nestled under the protecting cover a marvelous little sprig of fern sending
out tentative but hopeful little fronds in search of sunlight to activate
its astoundingly complex and, to me, miraculous chlorophyll;
-
stopping
dead-still to marvel at the cottontail rabbit brought to a timorous freeze
by my long, low whistle, an un-rabbitlike sound that required it to be still
and take inventory of this unexpected presence with this unnatural sound;
-
looking up to
see a lone buzzard leisurely riding the thermals that neither he nor I could
see but that we both could accept with such wonder and gratitude as either
of us could muster;
-
walking up on
some scattered bones, bleached white as cotton by winter wind and summer
sun, the final resting place of some cow who had bellied down in the grass
never again to summon the strength to get up, on her hind legs first and
then on her front legs, for a continuation of her lifelong quest for more
grass to put away in one of her many-chambered stomachs before regurgitating
it as a cud on which she might placidly chew, as such ruminants are wont to
do; or it could have been a small horse unable for that last time to get up,
first on its front legs and then on its hind legs, as such creatures do who
neither part the hoof nor chew the cud-there was no skull to enable me to
make a positive identification of this corpus delicti; but pondered long
there in sober reflection on the fleeting nature of life for all creatures
great and small which, as James says, is “a vapor that appeareth for a
little time and then vanisheth away” (James 4:14);
-
spying a not
unfriendly brown thrush which, although it is rather secretive by nature, in
this instance hopped around in a bush apparently oblivious to my intrusion
about which it, at the moment, seemed to be perfectly unconcerned;
-
marveling at a squirrel’s
nest situated precariously on a smallish limb far up in a great old post oak
tree which, in the south side of the main trunk, boasted a smoothly worn
hole about as big as a hen egg, a hole which no doubt had been stocked by
the resident fox squirrel with a goodly supply of acorns;
-
a mysterious
small patch of recently excavated holes whose builders and makers I could
not identify but who, I mused, might be foxes, armadillos, civet cats, or
some critter totally unknown to me when I first started walking those woods
75 years ago;
-
a patch of
second-growth timber, several acres in all, which brought vivid
recollections of the winter when my father decided to clear that land with a
sharp double-bit axe, which clearing he did single-handedly, and which
virgin land he then broke with two mules and turning plow before planting a
crop of corn and then in due time gathering in the new produce, but this
new-ground has now, after sixty-five or seventy years, reverted to its
original status without so much as a remaining furrow to mark my father’s
prodigious labors-which must be something of a parable of all human
endeavors from the hanging gardens of Semiramis to the Colossus of Rhodes;
and
-
coming up on
an old snake skin shed when some fearsome, though non-poisonous, black racer
had come to its seasonal change of clothing, a mute reminder that the cycles
of nature, ordained by the Creator, are moving right along, thank you, no
matter who is in the State House, the White House, or the Glass House on the
East River and totally oblivious to genomes, space stations, spy planes, or
Wall Street gyrations. Hm-m-m-m.
In due time I ambled back
to my car by the tickle-tongue trees and relished a peaceful drive back home,
braking the journey only briefly for a Dairy Queen Blizzard dutifully held
upside down by the pleasant young woman who had created this luscious concoction
before she passed it to me for appropriate disposition, a fitting finale for a
wonderful walk in the woods. ¢
Updated Wednesday, January 02, 2002
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