6:58 a.m. 28 degrees, wind WNW 0 mph. Sky: a thick, disingenuous cloud cover, horizon to horizon, should have held down yesterday's heat. Rolls and folds of blue-gray, edge to edge. A heat sink. Permanent streams: iceless, full-throated gurgles and babbles, a gushing hillside run, clear as a windowpane. White-breasted nuthatch flies across the upper stream, lands on a thin maple. Yank. Yank. Wanders up the trunk, picking at things I can't see. Ruffed grouse, an explosive exodus, a whirring of wings, startles. Rivets our attention. Wetlands: nacreous reeds bent with frost, isles glazed, a sugar-coated marsh. Pond: ice thicker. Otter long-gone. No fresh sign. Dogs engage in old spoor, noses to the ground, snorting. I review yesterday's holes, still evident. Crayfish claws, traced with frost, engulfed in ice, one day older, one day grimmer. An artifact of a fondness for shellfish. Otter could be miles away . . . the Ompompanoosuc (either East or West branch); below Union Village Dam, where the branches couple and flow flatly to the Connecticut; or, perhaps, the Connecticut itself, north or south. Maybe he's in the three ponds beyond the eastern rim of Coyote Hollow; or the necklace of marshes to the west. Or my neighbor's trout pond for a fish filet.
Otter: the lingering gift of a nomadic visitor, absentee enchantment like silent chimes. Just to know that our paths crossed yesterday, hours apart, my enthusiasm remains unspilled and buoyed for sunrise walks. I never know who wandered through the corrugated countryside until I look. Eyes wide, still awed by the simplicity of home.
I'm re-reading PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK again, and came to this line that reminds me of you and the otter: "Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery." Sometimes, like Annie Dillard, you come up with a phrase that leaves me gobsmacked: "absentee enchantment like silent chimes." Thank you.