The Wild Marsh (58 page)

I investigate and find the three girls are playing tennis, or some wild variant thereof, in the utility room. They are wearing their bicycle helmets for safety, and the tennis ball is ricocheting in all directions—off not just the walls but the tile floor and ceiling and even the washer and dryer (when it hits either of these two appliances, it gives a pleasing and resounding bass drum). The girls are shrieking and giggling—it's more like tennis defense than tennis—and the unfortunate cat is in that tiny room with them leaping and scooting back and forth like a flying squirrel.

They've got their bicycle helmets on. They're not hurting anything. They're having a good time. I close the door and go back to the movie. Where else are they going to play tennis at this time of year?

 

The way they hurl themselves at play and pleasure: leaping into snowdrifts for no other reason than to make snow angels—all three girls lying on their backs out in the yard, flapping and kicking, fanning one snow angel after another, until the yard is filled with them.

Ever thoughtful, Lowry runs over to Homer's grave and lies down on top of it and fans one for her too, remembering how she used to love to play and caper in the snow.

 

The older I get—and the more I learn from my children, learning even as I attempt to teach them some things—the more I remember that, for all my rhapsodic love of nature, and particularly the unaltered and uncompromising wilderness, it is, after all, always friends and family and community that make us most human, and most humane. Just because there are far more humans than there is wilderness, particularly American wilderness, does not diminish the sweetness of friendships, or childhood, or community, and indeed, from an individual's perspective, given the brevity of our time here in the physical world of rock and snow, antler and bone, fruit and meat, sky and sun, these latter pleasures are actually more
ephemeral than even the fast-diminishing and beleaguered unprotected wilderness itself.

Children grow up and move away, friends grow old and stooped, communities shift and flow, fragment and weave back together. The deliciousness of a moment, and of beauty, is almost always heightened by the consciousness of such brevity. It is a sweetness, an awareness, however, that I sometimes tend to overlook, or take for granted; and it's good for me, particularly during the holidays, to step back and remember that it is not merely the marsh, or the natural cycles of things, that give me stability and even peace in a tumultuous world, but also the braid, the weave, of people passing all around me—a current of people, friends and others, as ceaseless and interesting as the wind itself, or the currents of some broad river, or, again, the flow of the seasons themselves, passing around and around the globe, year after year, bathing us in change, and at the same time bathing us in regularity, with a constancy that is remarkable, and which in my opinion follows very much in the same pattern and logic as does the human emotion of love.

It's New Year's Eve, and snowing hard, a true blizzard, with huge, soft flakes falling by the millions. We're having some friends over to celebrate, and we've been cooking all afternoon: grilling an elk ham, slow-roasting a couple of pheasants, and baking desserts. The Christmas tree is lit up outside, glowing blue and yellow and green and red in the storm, barely visible, like a lighthouse, and it's seven p.m, and the phones are all out, and we're waiting, waiting, waiting: watching out the window, and waiting.

At about eight o'clock, the headlights appear through the trees and falling snow, coming slowly down the driveway, one truck, and then another, and another, and then another.

My heart leaps. I couldn't stop it if I wanted. Here they come again. Here comes everything again, one more time, at least.