A half-mile walk in the direction not-toward-the-mall, the suburban homes
give way to open fields full of noisy blackbirds and jays. Here the buttercups
have gone wild like undergrads at the beach ignoring social distancing
and glorying foolishly in their own youth. Masked, and walking the length
of one field’s heavily weathered split rail fence here and there hold together
with baling wire, I take a couple snaps with my phone that completely lose
the glory of the yellow. It’s a bit like trying to take a picture at night of
the profusion that is the Milky Way and getting vague and underexposed gray
instead of the 400 billion strewn diamonds. Farther on, where the road turns
sharply north, I turn back to look over the way I have come: the view goes far
as the ridge on the other shore of the lake, then farther to the notch in the ridge
to the south that’s the valley where a thousand years ago the Tutelo people
lived until soldiers of the very young America’s Revolutionary Army killed them
on the orders of the father of our country. Quite a view from here, really.