From Andes

There was a time when I spent summers up in the Catskill Mountains in the town of Andes. I stayed in a little house on top of one of those rolling hills (small mountains) that ripple through that part of New York. The view from the house was always in the throes of incoming weather: summer clouds, wind, morning mist, and thunderstorms. It never held still...




Down the hill in the middle of the field there was a creek, blissfully clean and cold, running between the high banks it had cut for itself. It emerged from a culvert beneath the dirt road, the circle of metal reflected among the happy summer jumble of rocks and wild flowers...




It made its way into the hemlock forest where, under the huge trees, it muscled its way around gigantic rocks furred in moss, in between fountains of ferns and tangled wild blackberries, all the way down to the reservoir miles below...






In the meadow a spring ran from underground in a scribbled wetness that joined the creek through a miniature realm of dark-mud deltas, greenery and shadowy, reflective chaos...