Some mornings I am quiet when we walk down to the water, last night’s dream still resonating. The one where the young man danced on a long beam, where we still had dogs, where I couldn’t find the cloth for our table. Something was about to happen and I could only wait.
I was quiet, looking up into the leafy maples, thinking about their vertical ecosystems, mostly unseen by those of us below — the epiphyte colonies established in their crown areas, lichens, mosses, ferns, and how they increase the nutrients available to the trees. I was thinking that dreams are a bit like this. Our waking lives are nourished by what we remember, and don’t, of the dramas that happen while we sleep.
When I pushed off into the water this morning, a single merganser fluttered a bit near the log beyond the beach area and swam away. A few weeks ago, 2 merganser chicks were swimming alone in the same area. They were too young to have left their mother for lives of their own but there was no adult duck in sight. Some years around this time, we’ve seen newly-hatched chicks, once 17 of the tiniest babies, like puffs of thistledown, some of them riding their mother’s back, all of them close to her as she swam along the shore, feeding. Later in the year, we saw a female merganser, maybe the same one, with 6 chicks, then 4. Ospreys patrol the lake, as do eagles. Ravens are often in the trees when we came for our morning swim. So anything could have picked off the babies until just a handful were left. But 2, without a mother in sight? And then this morning, a female in the same area, looking a little forlorn?
I was forlorn for the merganser’s sake, swimming and thinking about my dream, the bare table, the waiting. Some mornings the veil between this life and another feels very thin, gossamer, as light as the sun on my shoulders as I stepped from the water.
