Week 4: Pre-Post

I was excited to dive into this section of the Sand County Almanac readings because it deals with my favorite time of year. I absolutely love the Fall. The leaves changing to those glorious shades of deep reds, golds, burnt oranges, even browns. Yes, it is all lovely. I love the changes in the air as it turns cold and the feeling when you walk out your front door on a Saturday morning and you can smell the change in temperature just as much as you can feel it. It sudden urge to light a fire and snuggle up in a blanket and read a book next to a great big window and a roaring fire.

The night is extra still and gives you pause to consider the feeling of solitude, though it is not as strong as the feeling that comes in winter, standing in the middle of a field of snow. The only disruption in the gentle blanket, your footsteps. Winter is a time that to some seems dead. I see it, however, as a white backdrop that enables you to notice so many small things that may be overlooked in other seasons.

Winter to me, is summed up in a moment I can never forget. The cloudy afternoon in the winter of my junior year of high school where I was walking across the practice football field after the sky had dropped a bounty of snow that morning. I stopped in the middle of the field, feeling the silence, hearing it echo and shout around me, louder, in that moment, than any silence I had ever heard before. I saw the footsteps of my boots as they trampled on the grass hidden underneath walk across the field and lead to where I was standing. No one else had some this way since the snow had fallen, each flake delicately in its own piece of ground. Robert Frost's poetry, several poems in fact, came rushing to my mind. It was my moment. My split second in time, just me and the world. I will never forget that moment.

Perhaps my favorite passage out of this section is found on page 97 and is accompanied by a picture of a Barred Owl.

The Choral Copse
"By September, the day breaks with little help from birds. A song sparrow may  give a single half-hearted song, a woodcock may twitter overhead en route to his daytime thicket, a barred owl may terminate the night's argument with one last wavering call but few others have anything to say or sing about.
It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn daybreaks that one may hear the chorus of quail. the silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come. After a brief minute or two, the music closes as suddenly as it began."

I love the idea that there is barely noise as the sun rises and then, in this great moment, every morning as the sun crests the horizon, there is a great swell of emotion and song as the birds welcome the fresh day ahead. They appreciate the beauty of the day ahead without thought to why they do it. They just are a part of the glory that comes at dawn each day.