On the Edge, Precariously

Hoping for a little sunlight and thinking wistfully about blooming waterlilies, she lays hands on her hip waders and her canvas helmet with its arty mosquito netting, then dons her tatty old photographer's vest.

Feeling (albeit briefly) like a hero in an old African movie, perhaps Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, she potters hopefully off to the beaver pond with a camera slung around her neck and her pockets full of lenses and filters.  Spencer, ever a fan of ponds, shorelines, reeds and lovely, dark, squishy mud, potters along at her side.  Did I mention that one pocket in the vest is full of doggy biscuits? Shhhhhhhh, she is not supposed to be wobbling precariously about on such an uneven shoreline.  She is not supposed to be carrying a camera. Come to think of it, she is not supposed to be here at all. Losing her balance and falling (most inelegantly) right into the pond is a definite possibility.

There is no sunshine in her favorite place, just veils of drifting fog, a web of dreaming trees on the far shore, gently rustling reeds and quiet ripples around the toes of my rubber footwear. A single heron stands at the far end of the pond like a statue, and we can see it vaguely, but the great bird declines to be recorded on a memory card and floats majestically off into the mist.  Occasionally, there is the quacking of unseen ducks, the slow lap of beavers swimming somewhere nearby, a sonorous chorus of horn-throated frogs improvising melodies among the reeds, bulrushes, and other watery grasses.

The place is nebulous and ethereal and perfect in every way.  Who needs sunlight and waterlilies on such a morning as this? Ponderings about health issues, the meaning of life and my relevance in the greater scheme of things simply seem to fall away.  Weeks or months or years from now, I will look at the morning's photos and (hopefully) remember how magical this soggy, foggy May morning was.

quiet pond

dog jumps in

splash

(with apologies to Matsuo Basho)