Unanticipated

 

A week ago, Fin and I took a walk. We were ostensibly on the hunt for mushrooms, but it’s been so dry that other than a fine patch of hedgehogs, we found none.

We stopped for a while to sit in the woods, lowering ourselves into a patch of moss-like plants. They looked sort of like little spruce trees, but were not.

“Papa,” said Fin, “did you know these plants are the same species as a tree that used to grow a half-dozen feet around and like a hundred feet tall?”

I had not known that.

For the next quarter-hour or so, we lay in a soft bed of plants descended from enormous prehistoric trees.

 

This morning, Rye and I went fishing. We loaded the kayak onto the truck and rumbled over to Nichol’s Pond. We were the only humans on the water. The sun was bright and warm and made me a little sleepy, and from across the pond we could hear a loon. Or maybe two. I caught a small bass and a sunfish; Rye caught two sunfish and a perch. We put them back in the water and they flickered out of sight.

One the way home, I reached across the truck’s bench seat and he held my hand and I did not take it for granted, because soon there will come a day when he will not do such a thing. So I squeezed a little. He looked over at me and grinned. And then he squeezed back.

 

Sometimes I am struck by the fact that the moments I most remember, the ones that feel as if they are embodied by everything that makes life something we are afraid to give up, are the moments I could never have anticipated.