While we were busy with Other Things, the young silver maple saplings in the far northeast field stretched themselves upward oh, say, another three feet or so and if we get to live here another twenty-three years, the humble and bumpy walking path Patrick carved out with a rented walk-behind brush hog mower will become a shrouded forest path where future fallen leaves will soften our footsteps. Parents reading this, please tell me you understand. Without children of our own, I can only imagine what it’s like to tuck your toddler into bed one night and find her filling out the paperwork for her temporary driver’s license the next morning, asking for your signature in the “parent/guardian” section and hoping you’ll cover her first six months’ insurance payments. Caring for any living thing from the beginning is a never-ending double take and don’t blink existence.

I try to live in the present moment, truly I do, and I fancy myself a fairly decent noticer of my surroundings, but each morning’s walk sends me right back to “Paying Attention" preschool. Whenever time allows, I dawdle and mosey about the paths, stepping off of them now and again to inspect new treefalls and one particularly curious patch of freshly turned and crumbled earth—two holes separated by about seven inches of undisturbed grass. Not sure what the digger was looking for; they appeared to have lost interest and moved on, leaving behind a nice ankle-turner for someone (me) on the day everything is covered in snow and the edges of the walking path are anyone’s guess. Maybe writing it down here will help me remember and save us all a trip to the ER.

If Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, I walk the land to reset my spiritual password, to freshen up my outlook and scrub off another layer of complacency’s thick skin. Let’s call it mindfulness exfoliation and, guess what? It works, every time. To have a wellness strategy so unflinchingly reliable is both responsibility and pure gift, and it shares the company of only a few others (Patrick, water, breathing). They are mine to employ or ignore, with risks on both sides. But I never regret the decision to suit up and step out, covering the better part of seventeen acres in just less than an hour. If not for a day job that keeps our creditors happy and the fridge full of options, who knows if I’d ever come back to the house? There’s just so much to see out there, to notice and register and revel in, a perpetual party with a buffet that keeps refilling itself to feed each and every one of my senses. My hunger is never satisfied but I don’t feel greedy. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how that works.

Until then, I come to a place on the field path (and in my thoughts) where I realize the impermanence of it all. At some unknown hour, my feet will no longer make contact with this generous and forgiving soil. The box elders by the chicken coop, that we didn’t plant or have anything to do with except leave them alone, will lay down and be finished in their growth, and a different flock of sparrows than the one we currently know will take to flitting from one dead branch to another, their chirps heard by someone else (human or not). The trees I lean against and whisper my thanks to will give shade and shelter to other visitors or be moved once and for all to a different interpretation of who they currently are. I don’t linger in this mind space but for a few moments, long enough to appreciate that what I’m standing on, surrounded by and tending to in This Moment is all there is, and all that matters. Then it’s onward through the meadow to make a note that it might be helpful for me to learn how to use the smaller chainsaw and finish a fallen old mulberry’s dramatic exit, stacking the chunks of its trunk and limbs for a future sweat fire or one of Patrick’s masterful wood-turned works of art. To-do lists have a way of keeping the existential and melancholic at bay.

At last count, 56 of the tulips I planted last fall have zoomed past the soil line, taking in the warmer days with great joy and purpose. The deer have found a handful planted beneath a perfectly shaped mulberry sapling in the garden and after rooting up the bulbs, decided to leave the remaining ones alone. September’s fallen buckeyes and horse chestnuts on both sides of the gravely driveway have pushed themselves up through the scattered leaf mulch, determined to reforest the area that our local electric company slashed and poisoned beneath the power lines strung above the creek. We’ll gently relocate as many of these young ones as we can in the eastern field, along with more volunteer maple and sycamore saplings until we’ve got a going arboreal concern.

Impermanent? Yes, every bit of it.

Still worth the effort?

You bet.