First Footing at Mint Springs Park

My sister Nancy spent her last years in Perthshire in the Scottish Highlands.  Friends there celebrated the first hours of Hogmanay, New Years day.  They walked, or if not intending to drink, drove to each others houses where their friends refreshed them with food, drink, and Auld Lang Syne.  The first foot to enter the house on Hogmanay would visit the house often for the rest of the year.  Though friends vied to set the first foot in the house, anyone who came by on the first of January would be a welcome and frequent visitor for the rest of the year.

Ox and I slept late after our traditional quiet New Year’s Eve.  We spent a quiet day at home, Ox catching up on internet correspondence, and I trying to finish a knitted Christmas present.

In the evening we drove to Mint Springs Park to make 2016’s first footing.  It was five o’clock, already lighter at that hour than it had been at five in the weeks before.  We parked by shelter one and walked counterclockwise around the pond.  The sunset appeared first in the northeast.  Tree feathers on the hilltop brushed the salmon sky.  The shadow of the hill darkened the northeast half of the pond; it was topped with a richer salmon color toward us.  Then the setting sun’s reflection moved to the dam.  At last the real sunset showed in the west, in the valley between two hills.  For a few minutes the whole sky was salmon orange. The water looked like hammered brass from the south side of the lake.  Breezes and inlet currents crossed to make these shiny scales.

We met a woman leading three large dogs.  We had met the dogs before.  They sniffed our hands, wagged their tails, and dragged the woman toward the shelter.  We followed their wet footprints back to one large dark wet place on the path and then to another.  The wet footprints ended at this place where the dogs had first jumped in the pond.

From the dam on the east side of the lake we saw the goose flock (Ox counted 23) feeding in the grass by the cattails.  The water, moved by a stiffer breeze, took on the appearance of salmon stucco.  At our approach the geese moved silently toward the water; we split the flock on our path toward the car.  Gray erased the sky's salmon color. The chilly air turned cold. 

We left Mint Springs Park, happy in the notion that we would return there frequently in 2016.