The road is red clay, full of ruts where rain water likes to pool.
Saltwater puddles here too, from the nearby marsh when the tide is high or the storms severe.
An old wharf road which shouldn’t be here and with rising seas won’t be here for long, part of its charm.
The red clay rises narrow between corn fields on either side; a slight incline without a hint of what’s ahead.
This makes it best, the revelation yet to come.
The corn rattles in the wind, blowing nearly a gale.
New normal now.
Standing back to the worst of it coming in off the saltwater bay, and only a lick from the Strait, you shake from cold; long, lean and shivering like the graying stalks beside you, their husks raspy, windswept.
You attempt to capture the wildness but mostly it captures you.
Days later, calmer, it beckons again. We take your golden sister here at her request. She loves the Wharf Road like it is her own, or better, like it is everyone’s. Her everyone includes so many. No one is left on the margins wondering if they are real to others. The animal kingdom whispers to her the way that birds and creatures whisper to you.
I am here, I am real they say to patient listeners.
We park on a dry, grassed laneway roadside so we can get a walk in and to avoid tires stuck in mud.
No other humans here as we walk half the length of the field to where the buffer zone—minimal—crafts a scant break between what’s farmed and the inlet ahead.
Myriad saltwater pools rimmed by marsh grasses, copper in the slant of late November sun give way to steel blue waters, rusty sand. A few scraggly spruce.
And yet, these words, a mere adumbration of the epiphany before us.
Penultimate.
Important.
We comment on the silence, feel the deep lapping of the waters on the now cold, pre-winter sand, rhythmic in our chests.
And walking back to the car, we stop for photographs; that tree which looks magnificent in the late afternoon light has caught your eye.
Your sister stands beatific.
We are all exalted.
Listening, we notice the now cut corn is making sounds. Not sure what they are but they are real and coming from the broken bits of shaft left behind post harvest.
Besides, what is more real but this beauty, this now, and how forever changing?
Happy seventeenth Lucas!
Love your ma
We are making sounds. Not sure what they are, but this is so real 🧡
Thanks for adding the photo.
Love!
Very beautiful, Jill- love it!! ma