On a Walk in Late Winter

There’s a light on inside that house, a bright square of yellow-gold on a field of grey shingles, behind a stand of dark leafless trees. Cool and damp under a mottled grey sky, it feels like it’s about to rain.

A woman emerges, approaching her mailbox. “I like your house,” I said. “Me too,” says she with a quiet smile. Turning with her mail, she recedes into the woods toward the glow beyond. A small mongrel dog trails her, wagging its wiry tail. Warmed by this simple encounter, I imagine a cozy scene: Back inside, she makes some tea, turns the log over on the fire, settles down at the kitchen table to peruse her mail, telling her dog all about it.

Now I’m passing a vast off-season field of golden-greige, then a flat grey pond reflecting the threatening sky. Woods surround every open space. In silhouette the spiky branches appear burned: charcoal. Obscuring the dark bark, flat pale green lichen paints its way up the tree trunks, and deposits itself in scraggly clumps along the branches and at their tips. A squirrel’s nest is abandoned at the intersection of limbs.

Stone walls seem to line nearly every road and many yards and driveways. Piles of round rocks hold up mailboxes. Rambling towards home, I pass dried-to-gold switchgrass resembling Van Gogh’s haystacks standing along the roadside in the rusty mulch of long-dead leaves, ochre and sienna. Eastern red cedar, cypress and spruces, and bushy evergreens everywhere mingle with their naked deciduous neighbors. Rhododendrons refuse to stop. It’s a world of forest green, dark warm greys and tawny tans, punctuated by gold. Everywhere there is something gold.

No rain after all, but it’s getting dark by the time I pass a big old house set not far back from the road, behind its own ancient, low stone wall, mottled with golden lichen. The uncovered windows are a set of glowing vertical rectangles side-by-side across one whole dark façade. They reveal a well-stocked library, a few table lamps alight, and the tops of two elderly heads in wing chairs. Beyond, I can see the corner of a kitchen. It’s so appealing I want to stand and stare but of course I do not. Conjuring the scent of something delicious roasting while they read and wait, I move on.

It’s not late but very dark by the time I reach the village and my own little cottage, its windows softly illuminated from within, the neglected front porch swing still hanging – either well past the season or early for the next.

My neighbor is arriving home.

“Good day?” I ask.

“Yes! You?” he replies, friendly ‘though exhausted.

“Excellent, thanks.”

We don’t need to detail the rich totality of life here on the Vineyard, or even of the past hour. It’s a lot, plenty, enough, just to be here, home.