Hawk with squirrel

I can't imagine what it was like to live without dogs and without a park just steps from my door.

If I did not live by a park, I never would have learned to recognize the beautiful shagbark hickory, or the gorgeous flowers of the tulip poplar.

In the winter, Carl and I love to sit in the living room and look out over the dense black spread of tree canopy across the street, sometimes covered with snow, sometimes so black against a deep, deep sapphire gray evening sky, sometimes lit by lightning.

I love that the dogs and I can wander in and kick dry leaves, listen to the sounds of jays, nuthatches, thrushes, owls, woodpeckers and yes, crows, because the even the raucous caws of crows tell a story.

I love that water from somewhere deep underground makes a permanent, tiny little stream at one end of the park, just a drizzle really, from the top of one treed slope down to the bottom. It's barely there, now, because it is so covered in leaves, but the flow still ripples, creating a tiny pool that the dogs like to lap from.

I love the contrast between the traffic that zips along the street, always rushing, oblivious and too fast to a destination, and the life in the park, equally oblivious but somehow more ... purposeful?

On Thursday, the dogs and I walked down into the park and immediately off to my left a motion caught my attention. I turned and into my full field of vision a hawk lifted up, a small creature in its talons. Off it flapped, but not too far and I thought if we walked quietly enough we might get close enough to see what it had caught.

Then I heard what sounded like, very far away, a baby crying. It wasn't though, of course not.

Also to my left, in a bare tree, was a squirrel, looking down at us and quietly making that chattering sound that angry squirrels make. Except it was not a rat-a-tat chatter, it was more like the single notes, repeated slowly, over and over.

The squirrel saw us, flipped head up quickly and dived into a hole in the tree. The head poked out and watched us, now silent.

I had to wonder if the small creature had seen its companion taken by the hawk, which we saw, again, lift up from the leaf litter with a lifeless shape in its grip, and flap away to another end of the park.

Another hawk glided behind it.

I though about how days start and end, with the expectation that life will continue on as normal, uneventful. Thankfully, most days, it does.

We continued on our way, kicking the dry leaves and smelling the cinnamon scent of fall.

Time

There is, among many, a great scene in the movie "Blade Runner," toward the end. Rutger Hauer's character is dying as Harrison Ford's character watches. Its in a deep, depressingly rainy, decaying and dark city. Hauer's character, as a replicant who has developed human emotions, aches to think that all he has felt, learned, touched, loved and experienced, will be lost "as tears, in the rain."

It's hard to describe what those words mean to me. They mean everything.

Today, the day broke to a turquoise sky, to carpets of gold and bronze, to the sounds of .... leaf blowers. (We interrupt this reverie! Attention: Please put on your noise-cancelling headphones!)

Yet, it was all my morning, my day. I watched the dogs put their noses to piles of leaves, I listened to leaf blowers and to football games on TV. I sat outside in the slanting afternoon sun and picked a November bouquet out of herbs and flowers luckily untouched by frost.

A tear to remember. Holli, evening walk in the park. She wades into the stream, into a small pool, dips her needle nose down and drinks.

She finishes and a few drops fall from her nose. The pond's surface ripples and I see dark shapes, linear and uneven. The ripples lose energy and the surface becomes still, the reflected images clearer. The still mirror becomes a canvas for the bare trees.

I think this is the meaning of tears in the rain. To notice, and to remember, the beauty of the most ordinary of moments.