Herons and Revisitations

It has been snowing again, and there is more of it to come. Alas, snow is as much a fact of life here in late February and early March as it is in January. At such times and in such weathers, there is little to be done, so I have succumbed to plaintive temptation and am undertaking a meandering journey through other places and other times with accumulated volumes of bad photos, tattered notebooks, journals full of scrawls and scraps of paper gathered on long ago travels. There are scraps of paper everywhere, and the rustling makes a fine comforting music on this gray day, rather like an old taffeta skirt.

Through the peaks and valleys of Donegal, Alaska and the Himalayas I go, slowly along the northern shores of Lake Superior, cold clear bays in the high Arctic and geysers in Iceland, past Pacific redwoods, Haida totems, long barrows and dancing stones, under winter skies where the Aurora dances, through deep dark forests and cloud covered hills on winding trails.

I turn a page and remember one cold autumn morning in northern Ontario. Migrating herons had congregated in the darkness before dawn, and hundreds of the magnificent birds were standing side by side in the foggy waters of the Mississagi river. As I walked along the shoreline, their stately silhouettes appeared one by one out of the mist as if by magic. There is enough enchantment in such tatterdemalion pages to last many lifetimes.

Note to self.... one of these years, I must be back in the real north in autumn when the herons are migrating. It has been far too long since I was there.