never in vain

This is a road less traveled by, up over hills and through valleys with bare, patient birch trees so white they stand out against the thick snow. This pavement flows as smooth as the tired yellow lines dividing the non-existent traffic, through a town of broad houses on the lake, boarded up for winter with rough plywood against the clean, colored window trim. Gray snow piles yield to puddles in the first melt of March, cold and harmless in the soft gravel shoulder where my boots leave gritty traces in the mud. To town is where this current heads, to the main street on the frozen lakeshore with a handful of solid tea houses, restaurants, and wooden planked general stores. For me it is all a postcard - gazebo in the lawn by the lake with blue string lights at dusk, lingering French from the wrinkled couples blending like cream into the settled coffee aroma, fog sliding off the hills from the warm wet air meeting this year's snowpack. It's a curled up bear rolling over once more to hit snooze before hibernation ends, it's a beaver rolling in the snow who has momentarily forgotten his unending urge to fix the dam, it's the tinkle of laughter from children narrowly evading an icicle finally melted free of the eaves. It's all these and pure silence, flowing down creeks and gulches in this Appalachian basin, water seeking a joyride to the lowest level with less than a nod for the structures that the primates have built. Fine slate roofs and leaded stained-glass keep out the elements another winter, the accomplishments of lumberjacks and capitalists. These towns and the moments of childhood spent swimming in summer and skiing in winter are origami cranes floating down wide rivers, no less beautiful because of their inevitable sinking below the ripples. Let us make more beauty with our hands and set if free to the world - what I have seen wash down stream in spring has inspired many a summertime project of whittling and sanding, shared smiles with friends over the endless possibilities that lie outside our small towns.