Earlier today Aster and I slipped away from the cats to go for a walk together on the mountain. In my mind I wanted to visit the Alex Joines knob and settle in for a while under a shade tree by the edge of the meadow. I know of some outcroppings of rock there to sit among overlooking Sparta.

It's too far for the cats and even if Tar Baby went along, the only adventurer among them, I'd be carrying him much of the time. That would mean his claws in my shoulder and him set to spring at the least surprise. The cats won't follow me through an open field except here at the house.

They know danger can come from the sky even more by surprise than on land. A cat would be a good meal for a big hawk or an owl. We don't know about those problems because we've never been stalked by one, except maybe fifty thousand years ago when we were smaller and the predators were bigger. The cats are still in that cycle of catch and kill to eat — get caught and die to be eaten. We only do that now psychologically in mind games. Old habits die hard.

Two hummingbirds dart about in the jewelweed patch as I write on the porch with Tar Baby asleep on the cushion beside me and Aster curled on her rug at the top of the steps. It's her lookout post. She likes to keep an eye on things.

The hummingbirds are chirping to one another a chirp tiny and delicate as a teacup of the finest china. Dainty. We don't use that word anymore without a snicker, but that's the word I was looking for.

I've held a few dead hummingbirds in my hand that flew into glass; they were dainty as dandelion fluff.

Aster and I walked over meadow freshly mowed, round bales standing around looking like grazing hairy mammoths with a nautilus spiral at both ends. I'd not walked on new mown meadow in quite awhile and it felt good under my feet. The green tractor with the hay rake behind it sat in silence looking over a day's work. The absent driver's green bottle of Mello-Yello was tucked in its place below the seat with red plastic cup upside down on top of it.

In the view from the top of the knob, Sparta was barely visible in the summer haze that gave the Blue Ridge their name. The Magnolia factory stood out as a white barge afloat on the waves of blue-green sea. More broken promises. I did not want to be looking at the icons of broken promises spread out over the land this afternoon. It was just the first consideration of a Sunday afternoon odyssey looking for a place to sit awhile and enjoy the scenery.

Aster and I scrambled down the side of the mountain among the trees, passing through some acres of ferns and the standing remains of old black pines. The oldest ones had rings around the trunk a few inches apart, green needles growing out of them in patches of a dozen or so, all the way around, bringing to mind hair in an old man's ears. The black pine is the one that grows its cones from rings around the limbs.

They fascinated me for a long time when I was new here; they looked like pines in Japanese paintings. One day looking in a tree identification book I saw that this pine only grows in an egg-shaped area of these mountains in northwestern North Carolina and southwestern Virginia. It also grows in an egg-shaped area in the Japanese mountains. When they're dead they turn black and stand for a long time, black trunk with black limbs sticking straight out all the way around to the top.

When we made it to the creek at the bottom I paid attention for another place to spend the afternoon. Several places were good, but none called. Even my special place was not it. I'd realized by then I wanted to write you from the porch today overlooking the scenery from home. It amused me to remember that before leaving the house I knew I wanted to write you from here today. But I wanted to get out and take a good walk with Aster, too. As it turned out both got done.

Darkness is creeping into the sky. The half moon is lit up in the south by the sun gone beyond the western horizon. A haze has settled over the meadow making the trees look painted by Monet. The trees are now like black paper cutouts on dark blue construction paper. Mars glowing red just appeared above the tops of the trees.

Katydids and other kinds of insects trill their ongoing symphony of several individuals playing their parts. It sounds like Philip Glass music. Some are probably tree frogs.

The haze over the meadow thickens as the dark advances. In moonlight the haze is a light blue that softens the black of the lower parts of the trees into a blue-gray. The mist glows faintly in the moonlight. Mars being the only star visible in the sky tells me the entire mountains are letting rise a mist from the early afternoon rain that restored the August damp air these mountains love.

The tops of the trees now are in mist. A ring is forming around the moon. The moving star of a passenger jet goes southeast to northwest in a straight line followed by its long low rumble. Another one going the other direction joins in. Now both are going out of hearing at opposite ends of the sky.

Back to the Backwoods Beat/Waterfall Road Archive

Email: news@alleghanynews.com