Reflections on a Visit

The weather was strange for central New York in mid-December, but that strangeness, that off-balance quality, is becoming normal. The geese circled overhead, honking incessantly, and even when they had settled down on the river, beyond the fields, you could still hear them calling to one another, like social media gone wild. I wandered along the shore of the lake one morning after the geese had left, looking into the stones beneath the clear water as if each of them represented a day of my childhood, idly tossed at the time but now accumulated and innumerable. There were dandelions still blooming in the grass, and next to them, thin sheets of ice, frozen overnight and broken in the morning. I knelt down and pushed aside dry oak leaves, looking for acorn caps, but the ones I found were already decomposing into the rich humus beneath the layers of leaves -- all exept for a few, carefully placed on the tops of the stone wall by chipmunks or squirrels for me to pick up and put in my pocket.