Brief Respite

I haven't blogged for a couple weeks because life has been unusually complicated and/or annoying. I did take a few days away, but it was an internet-free weekend out in the Missouri countryside, so no blogging was being done.

There was relaxation, though. Sleeping late and watching a bit of television. Taking a stroll through the garden. Venison teriyaki with garden-fresh vegetables. Really good coffee. Old friends and desultory conversation. Time to watch the hummingbirds and the nuthatches.

It rained much of Saturday, so on Sunday morning we set out for the wildlife preserve for a stroll. We walked the boardwalk over the swamp. The water was high and the native fauna were active. We saw a raccoon, a woodpecker couple, frogs, dragonflies, a crow, fish, skinks, a snake, bumblebees, and assorted other creatures.

My friend, who's been a city-dweller longer than I have, was more excited by the wildlife than I, but also of the firm opinion that it should keep at a distance. She talked about how peaceful it was, while I suggested it would be the perfect setting to film a horror movie. We get excited by different things, in different ways. Even in my excitement, I'm prone to be blasé, but she has no such compunctions. We've been friends for a long time.

Midway through our walk, we heard singing from the far side of the swamp, traveling across the water. It was haunting, beautiful but eerie, distorted so that we couldn't make out words. Perhaps my earlier rhapsodizing about the haunting stories that could be told had altered the atmosphere for her, because she began to feel creeped out. Oops.

We'd walked for almost two miles without seeing another human, save for one young man we'd passed at the entrance to the refuge, propped on a bench with a book of some sort. Not a reading book, some kind of journal, I thought it was, but he seemed to be seeking solitude so we had passed quickly. A swamp really isn't the place to get chatty with strangers. Was he the source of the mysterious music?

Of course he was. Not realizing we'd looped around a second time, he must have thought we'd already left. As he became aware he was no longer alone, he stopped singing, moving skittishly and looking up at us with a ducked head. We made a couple friendly comments about how much we'd enjoyed his singing, to put him at ease, and passed on.

A few seconds later, he'd recovered his wits enough to speak, and called after us. "It's National Pirate Day. That's why I'm dressed like a pirate!"

My friend and I exchanged amused glances, neither of us having noted anything remarkable about his skull-and-crossbones-patterned bandana or hoop earring. Perhaps we were both remembering how it was to have felt that young, that self-conscious, to feel the need to blurt out an explanation for our choice of dress to complete strangers.

"Oh, I've heard of that," my friend said, ever the sweet-natured one. Then we turned again and ambled on, noting the elms, sweet gum, and hummingbird vine.

At lunch, her mother asked us about the walk, and listed the wildlife we had seen: "Raccoon, woodpeckers, skinks, frogs, snake.."

"Oh, no, a snake!"

"And a singing pirate."

"A snake?" Apparently a pirate didn't seem remarkable to her. But a snake.

"Oh, he just ignored us. He just kind of flicked his tail and snaked away through the water."

"And the pirate was more afraid of us than we were of him."

I drove home that night, enjoying the novelty of highways marked with letters instead of numbers: DD, WW, T. I drove past the vaguely Anglian sounding waterways of Mingo Creek and Throgmorton Slough. In Arkansas, I barely resisted following the sign pointing to Success (Could it really be that easy?) but gave Scatterville a wide berth.

There were traffic hold-ups--overturned trailers and auto accidents and slow, country drivers. But it was a peaceful drive. I made it home in one, albeit stiff and sore, piece.

It's the closest thing I've had to a vacation in years. It was relaxing, despite the pirate.