Bittersweet

 

September 2, 2021

DJ arranged a gathering for me at Rye Knot. Convivial. I allowed vodka in celebration, and came home happily drunk. Tea-totaling today. Much of the chatter concerned church politics, the hot point right now being a letter I wrote to the vestry expressing my exhaustion and impatience with those still whining about injustices that never actually happened to clergy who actually abandoned us in an hour of crisis, setting as many fires as they could behind them. I was fearful for an hour or so, but when the responses began to appear, they were either in agreement with me or so stupid as not to be taken seriously. Nothing assists an argument like an inept rebuttal. 

Went to the forest, which, this being a weekday, was less crowded. I got the last parking place at the Bent Creek trailhead. There’s a side trail I often take and then retrace my steps because it crosses a creek. This time I calculated that I’d wet my shoes but little jumping from this stone to that, and so I did, and walked a path new to me, though I knew very well where I was going, having seen the other end of it near Lake Powhatan. Open spaces alternated with forest, so there was a great variety of late summer blooms, which pleased me. Sat in the sun at lakeside. On the path back a man was pulling something at the path side. We chatted a little. He’s a retired park ranger who has taken on the unofficial task of removing invasive Oriental bittersweet wherever he sees it. In the parking lot two old men rested in lawn chairs in the shade beside my car, retirees from Enka High who, the one said, met every so often to hike and then sit somewhere and solve the problems of the world. As I pulled out they were arguing with a young man about Covid and the wearing of masks, they in favor of it and the young man expressing skepticism. I think he was doing it just to have a conversation. 

Trimmed giant cosmos from around the smoke tree, which they overwhelmed.

It is a remarkable fact that mosquitos are ten times worse in my garden than they are in the deepest forest, or even in the swamps around the lake.