I've been reading a book called Swampwalker's Journal A Wetlands Year by David M. Carroll. He nightwatches a lot cause that's typically when all the action happens, under the cover of dark, when things go slither and crick in the vernal pools, marshes, floodplains, peatlands. I get it - the compelling company of insects and birds, weeds and willows is enough to wonder why you ever spend time with other people; they're so comparably boring in their toe gazing. I went to bed reading about muskrats and minks and woke up just as dawn broke. I took the dog through the wet grasses where the sugar maple has already started to turn towards fall and into the forest where we climbed a muddy hillock and stood in a grove of deciduous trees all dappling and lit from behind. The sun clung to the moisture bits in the air.
We walked the gravel path through the brush that smells like licorice when you rub bits of its white granular seeds between your fingers. The dew was still hanging about. And the snails, holy p'jesus they were hanging off tiny weightless twigs antennae outstretched gooey bodies wrapped around edibles (they eat with their stomach, through their stomach, they wrap themselves full body across a line of dead growth and then scoop it up like a manna ray folding into itself) mama snail baby snail lover snails waking from a honeymoon sleep with the sun on their back. People kept jogging by me as I crouched in the ditch wet to my knees glasses foggy in the morning breath of the ravine surrounded by thousands of snails but nobody looked up. Or sideways, for that matter.
It's a barely traceable amount of time - between darkness, dew, dappling, dream and sunlight burning down, things disappearing, crawling back under cover. All summer I've tried to get out at the in-between time, the momentary middle place, but it's hard to stalk - the sunlight arcs in new movements now.
I saw Robin Hood around 6:45 a.m. in a black felt hat on a rickety bike coming around a corner, singing. I shit you not.
Apples. So long summer. It's been beautiful.
