Tuesday, August 17, 2010


The dogs and I romp through the same woods where Lily would often disappear for days from her prior owner, so to her these trees shadows stones and valleys are home.

Often she will leave her tattered tennis ball as a trace that she had passed this way before bounding over a rise to blend with the forest's deeper hollows that will slither away like the horizon. Dried leaves and contours in the land fold around her. Hidden in a world of optical illusion she slips through the landscape and is gone. She never runs away, just plays. I caught her once on the way out, zig zagging in happy flips and turns with ears pointed toward the sky and her tongue flopping like a yo yo. That's what she does.

Tonight She dropped the ball and vanished like a time traveler. She let go of here and stepped into there without me. I wandered with the other guys and passed the dried vernal pool, edged upward on a rocky rise, and walked easily where the rocks gave up and grass topped the soil in tufts. Ahead was the stacked stone foundation where holes for doorways remained in the four-sided sturdy piece of surprising make-shift architecture out where no roads lead, no neighbors pass, and sounds other than birds, cracking twigs, and the wind do not exist.

Who had lived on this opportune rise from which the ground slopes outward and down from this point like a skirt?

No Lily. Bandit was losing energy under his thick husky coat in the humidity. We went home.

Returning to the path I have stomped into the forest floor worn from months of running with the dogs, I meander on the crushed leaves, weaving through stones and beneath hemlock. Starting up a slope I nearly reach the top when Lily meats me and we walk home. She occasionally stops to glance back at me to make sure I am coming, I guess.

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