The air feels as cold as the water probably is as it crashes over the little falls, mist everywhere, hanging. The sun finally abandons scenes like this, though low light filters through. Following the flow of the creek, I feel like I’m walking on the earth, part of it, like the moving water, the trees,…
The young birch is the odd man in the patch of pines we’ve planted—slender, somewhat delicate, with heart-shaped leaves that reflect light as they twirl. I like to watch the young birch when the sun is low in the sky. The thin trunks reach up. The tilting leaves drink in the gold light, then disappear…
The slim forest feels like my link to the earth. Sometimes I stand on a stump and pretend I’m Emerson, a little teary-eyed. I stretch my arms out, lift my chin, close my eyes and imagine I am a transparent eyeball through which the force and knowledge of the universe flow unchanged. I am part…
Names of roads around here are evocative: Long Lick, Stamping Ground, Sulphur Wells, East Honaker, J.B. Lear, Burton, Glass, Lloyd, Skinnersburg, Josephine, Indian Creek, Pokeberry. I imagine a story in each of the names, and as I cruise along one and another road a little country world takes shape, and the stories grow day by…
A gray day has depth. “Let’s just walk right into it,” I tell the dogs. When we lose sight of home, the trees and fields in the deeper gray reflect thin light oddly, becoming shades and shapes of peculiar beauty. The dogs are happy to keep right on going into the crazy day, deeper, and…
I walk the path through the little forest all the time. The dogs criss-cross, proudly treeing squirrels. Cows graze just over the ridge. I am so close to this place I can change it with my mind, round bends to walnuts and elms lit up with blues from my eyes. Some days, when the wind…
The dogs like the chill but suspect the leaves hide everything. The squirrels run from tree to tree. Even the hawk, circling low, scans with severer intensity. Here is the cool site of dissolution—the fertile warmth breaking down, growth going to dust. I think the autumn wind is ominous, swirling its way around the sad…
“The Sea of Olives,” Bettina says as we drive through a forest of olive trees that spreads from the water right and left across the flat land and up the mountains to their tops. We ascend precariously to Delphi, and I understand what a mountain town is. My room overlooks the deep valley, the infinity…
“We’re going for a walk,” I call to John as I clip Hector to the leash. Hector is the new dog. He’s figuring the street out—analyzing smells at posts, cocking his head at distant barks, growling at squirrels and rabbits he can’t chase. My street is wide with no sidewalks, few cars. The curve past…
From my place down here, the big trees meet the sky in curved and zigzagged lines that mark their reach. A breeze, and the treetops trace themselves in the sky’s light, the light pouring through between leaves and branches. Some days, when the wind is feisty and the clouds are puffed up, the place where…
G Bebs / Photographs 