Friday Ramble - Last of the Year

How right to start this last ramble of the year with sunlight falling across the winding Clyde river in the eastern Ontario highlands near Hopetown. Ice and snow are slow in forming here - the river is old, and her currents run fast and free, looping through woodlands, down valleys and through farm fields. The Clyde is a wild spirit of the first order, a veritable crone among waterways, and she withstands freezing as long as she is able to hiss and roar and tumble along her way.  

In the depths of winter, I park myself on the bank and listen as the river sings her way along under the ice.  At times, she seems to be singing a duet with the wind, and there's a kind of Zen counterpoint at work, two unbridled entities utterly independent in their contours and rhythm, but meticulously interwoven and seamless in their harmonies.  Putting all notions of complex orchestration and conventional choreography aside, there's lovely music in the air on icy winter days. The sound of moving water  has always been a leitmotif in this old life, and I often think that my existence can be measured in rivers, currents and intermittent streams rather than cocktails, jewelry, pairs of shoes and coffee spoons.

This is the right place to stand on the trailing edge of the calendar year. In springtime, I watched as willows on the farther shore leafed out and turned silvery green, looked on a few weeks later as the river overflowed her banks and asserted her claim to the fertile fields on both sides.  In summer, I counted bales of hay and captured images of deer and wild turkeys feeding at dusk.  In autumn, I watched the sun go down over the same willows, so golden of leaf that they too seemed to be made of falling sunlight.  In the now, snow frosts every twig and tree, and light shining through them dazzles the eyes.

This is where I came with Spencer to collect my thoughts when my husband was diagnosed with cancer a few weeks ago, and it is where we come now to replenish the energies and inner directives needed to get through chemotherapy and radiation.  There have been times lately when we thought we were unraveling, but the river works her magic, and she knits us back together again, every single time. 

Thank you for sharing Friday rambles with me this year - may we share many more rambles in the shiny new year that is waiting for us all, just around the bend.