Toward Cool Water

Toward Cool Water ~   L'assemblage ©Michael Douglas Jones

Original artwork SOLD / Gallery 322 

Toward cool water, we walked north and west in the first days; Magdaléna, Pensée, and me. We fashioned canoes from strips of alder and ash, and moved toward cool water, away from the tribal fires on the ridge, away from the war before this war, away from the past, toward cool water, and toward the quiet of candlelight and concord.

Just south of the Patuxent River headwaters, we walked a furlong east of the buffalo road, at the midpoint where the slope between ridge and valley branch calms to a level large enough for a small cottage; there we made a home, facing east, to welcome each morning in the neverending season of forevernow.  

Now; now, we are older, we are timeless, yet vernal equinox moves in from the valley early, across the eastern horizon of old oaks, with promises from passerines heard above the first forecast of crows. Morning wakes, taking me up to the ridge to watch winter, with her worry, fade in the dawn brightening day. Behind me at the cottage, the melancholy cooing of mourning doves atop the terracotta chimney pot, predawn’s last song, softening to silence as I climb the hill beyond the tall pines. Silhouettes of robins in the redbud offer a new song, another chance to start, and a spring season to plant life anew; the past washed away in the floods of freshet, the cool, cool water of freshet.

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