Secret Belief in Perpetual Spring

There are only nineteen photos from yesterday's solo hike on Sugarloaf. I love hiking by myself, I love hiking with Earthgirl more. The slideshow will only take 38 seconds. Were you taught to type out alphabetically all numbers between one and twenty, start using Roman Arabic Numerals for numbers from 21 up? I was. Photos fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, the rock pile and the cairn (on this map it's the top of the hill between B5 and B6): I sat and shared conversation and their delicious hand-baked peanut butter gorp over water and catching breath with an wife and husband, combined age 167. They've lived in Flint Hill for 60 years (Willy Bayne lived in Flint Hill while married to Treva, exactly one of you knows of what I speak), have been hiking together - everywhere near, but Sugarloaf most - since they met and married and moved to Maryland. I love hiking by myself, I love hiking with Earthgirl more.

The below Lambchop was the last song on the shuffle before I parked, Lambchop was in my head the entire hike.







IN PERPETUAL SPRING

Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places

to sulk. You pass beds of

spiky voodoo lilies   

and trip over the roots   

of a sweet gum tree,   

in search of medieval   

plants whose leaves,   

when they drop off   

turn into birds

if they fall on land,

and colored carp if they   

plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal   

human desire for peace   

with every other species   

wells up in you. The lion   

and the lamb cuddling up.

The snake and the snail, kissing.

Even the prick of the thistle,   

queen of the weeds, revives   

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.