Presence Joy
With the red of the maples and most of the other leaves gone, the green doors of summer open into the valley behind the house I grew up in. In the bewitching hour before sunset, I walk through the doors into a vast cathedral lit by the warm glow of the yellow and gold leaves that remain. I roamed these hills and got lost here before I even went to grade school. I damned the stream and the caught a trout with a bright red leaf in this valley. I made my first fire, cooked my first meal, and slept on the ground for the first time in these woods. This is where I began becoming who I am. Before they were mine, these woods were farm fields. They have continued to become forest in the 35 years I’ve been gone. The irritating thorn trees and sticker bushes of my youth have been replaced with miles of impenetrable multi-flora rose strung through the understory like barbed wire along the front lines of war. The old dirt road has been a muddy mess since city sewage lines wer...