T.

Japanese maple, from my front porch

I crunched through the snow through the woods
this afternoon, saw a set of deer tracks. Felt
as if I didn't belong, as if the behemoth MicroS.
buildings looming above me up the hill didn't belong,
the apartment complex partially obscured by trees
didn't belong. Out of balance.(The world, not me.
But I'm not entirely certain of that. Some may disagree.)

But what peace, and how effortless it was to move my body
through that silenced landscape. Even the ducks -- walking
on top of their pond -- were oddly quiet. In our temperate
rainforest, all the ferns growing on the trunks of the big-leaf
maples were drooped with cold & ice. I recalled the blossoms
of the native blackberries lining my path last spring,
and how I missed their ripening mid-summer.What I would do
for a single bag of those tiny berries in my freezer,
pie-ready. It just makes sense to bake a blackberry pie
when we're snowed-in.