The Trail and the Smile Remain

There hasn't yet been time to walk it, but yesterday I blazed the trail completing the circle.   Our predecessors on this property had mowed a wide path north from the back yard toward the trees, forking eventually to the east and the simple fire circle long overgrown when we discovered it, and northwesterly toward the spring.  Both legs, we quickly discovered, dead-ended in the trees, either by neglect or design.  It's not that there is anything wrong with turning around and retracing steps you have just imprinted in the grass; it's just that our psyches or souls seem to prefer more orbital patterns.  We envisioned extending the northwesterly lane into an arcing reach that would eventually, and without regression, lead a nature-minded stroller back to the starting point.  

Seven months into our landed living, the dead-end remained. I would get to it I kept promising the two of us, deterred by no particular impediment save my own seemingly pathological resistance to leaving a mark of my own -- on the land, to be sure, but sometimes I think on life itself.  I dream well, but as happened that first time I climbed the ladder to the pool’s high diving board, more often than not I peer off the end into the distant and watery abyss, hesitate, and climb with a clinging shiver back down.  You would think I’d be over that at this age -- especially over an act as simple and impermanent as mowing a scenic path through a grassy field.  For whatever reason, and perhaps simply for greater importance, other projects had pushed ahead of this one in the queue -- trimming, sawing, chipping, seeding, trenching, tree-planting, bulb-planting, successively mowing.  Besides, before the path could be cut there would need to be a plan -- exactly where to bend it, between which trees to thread it, into how much of the neighboring acreage to encroach it, how artfully to shape it -- and then a survey to clear any blade-bending rocks.  

I can't account for the timing.  Indeed, there wasn't really time.  There was this single day between two trips, and rain was predicted.  There was laundry to do before repacking.  There was fresh milk to buy for Lori and a book to claim at the library.  The car needed gas, the seedlings in the greenhouse needed tending, and the sentimental ”Thousand Blossoms” asters received in the mail as a gift from Ellen’s daughter needed planting, all in addition to mowing before curtain time at the theater in the evening.   It just sort of happened.  Mowing along in the coolness of the morning, I reached the northern dead-end, and before I knew it a lusty glance to the west had escaped and the tractor followed after.  There was no scouted design nor cautionary survey, there was only the throb of the diesel engine, the whirling of the blades first high then low, uncharted grassland and my face stretched into an adventurous and satisfied smile.  

There hasn't been time to walk it, and after boarding yet another plane this morning it will yet be several days.  But the mark has been made; the trail blazed; the circle completed.  

And for reasons only the soul understands, the smile remains.