"Whose Woods These Are..."

Snuggled in my bed under a comforter with a heating pad trying to warm myself

up after a chill settled in during a glorious mid afternoon walk at Waterside and Maria walks quietly into my darkened room.

I say hello and she says you look so cozy.

I am I reply.

Well then, you won't feel like coming with me to get apple sticks (for the bunnies).

Oh, but I will, I reply and am up and out of my warm confines in an instant.

One of our two bunnies is a little under the weather and so I know keeping up the apple sticks routine would be of benefit and another walk would not hurt me at all.

Gearing up doesn't take long as I was under the comforter with my legwarmers and toque still on from my earlier outing. In a few short minutes we are walking in the lovely brisk air on the trail leading down to the apple grove.

I wait while she does the gathering. In a flash she has a fistful of small branches and we decide to make our way through a short trail through the evergreens in the dwindling light.

There is a feeling we get in the woods as the light is diminishing. Lucas has commented on it several times recently. It is as though a hush comes over the forest and as it does we feel awash in relaxation. The light is lessened, so our sight line becomes reduced to navigating the roots on the trails without tripping. As our focus is narrowed to what is in front of us the trees to either side of the trails become mere caricatures and any crackle of sound magnifies. I feel the result of the lessened light immediately in my chest. A tension in me eases as we make our way along the meandering trail.

We wander back to the gravel road sooner and are greeted by a shadowy moon above a precipice of evergreens. Trail side, there is a brilliantly white, large snowshoe hare, its eyes red and piercing. We decide to head to the cornfield along the wider and brighter gravel road to see the moon above the field and we are not disappointed. Heading back we encounter a second, much smaller white hare nibbling some plant matter before our presence causes it to leap, long- legged into the dark grasp of the woods. A few steps further along on the other side of the trail, the first hare remains sitting on its haunches, still as fear and just as near.

The white hares and the veiled moon walk has nailed us to the moment at hand. The sparseness of the early winter woods so piercing that we cannot help but feel enlivened by these punctuation marks of life and beauty.

Trail walking, even as brief as this walk was, has offered us its gifts and with open hearts we have received them.

Driving in the car a short while later to pick our son up from band practice, the opening line from Robert Frost's gorgeous, famous poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening came into my mind.

"Whose woods these are I think I know..."

I want to continue reciting it in my head but that is not its purpose here for this is where things become less clear.

The line seems so appropriate to the long ago times he wrote them in but they should not still fit today. How, I think to myself, how can woods belong to any one creature? The world cannot belong to us--we belong to it. The folly of private ownership has done so much damage to the Earth and its creatures.

I do not know what human has deed to the woods whose trails we frequent. I cannot help but think that the small forest there, home to Golden-crowned Kinglets and Hermit Thrushes, Bluejays and Black-capped Chickadees, Barred Owls and Ravens, Ruffed Grouse, Red Squirrels and Snowshoe Hares (to name a few sightings this autumn and early winter) belongs more to them--or better yet, they to it.

As Stratford continues to strip itself clean of any remaining treed areas with no wildlife corridors in sight despite the urging of Island Nature Trust director Megan Harris at the Natural Areas workshop the town hosted three years ago; as meadow lands give way to high density development, as we watch anything that was beautiful to gaze upon in this little community fall victim to chainsaw and pavement, I cannot help but wonder why humans have such hubris as to believe they could or should possibly own land in any real way.

Shared stewards of land perhaps, for the land belongs to no one.

Be well,

Jill