Solace at the Park

We have consoled ourselves this July for missing the wedding of a much-loved niece in California, by visiting Mint Springs Park every evening.  We go just before sunset, late enough in the day that few people are still at the park.  There are almost always one or two families of fisher people, sometimes a pair of lovers stroll over the dam hand and hand, sometimes mothers with small children play on the slides.  Twice the owner of the scofflaw dog has let him out at the top of the park to run, joyful and unleashed, down to the lower pond.  Every evening there is some surprise waiting for us at Mint Springs.

One night we found joy in the birds.  As we drove up to the park, a heron flew round the pond to the far marshy bit where the stream comes in from the hill above. 

Red-wing blackbirds had flocked and nested here for many years.  Muskrats gnawed down the cattails last fall and winter.  This spring the flock of red-wings returned, checked out the sparse remnants of cattails, and flew on.  This night we discovered two nesting couples of red-wing blackbirds had returned to the diminished stand of cattails. (Sadly, the muskrats, we have heard, have been relocated by park people; their silvery v-shaped wakes always thrilled us.)

We walked around the pond, passing quietly behind the flock of geese that often hangs out on the dam.  Though Canada geese are the hysterics of the bird world, they are so used to us that when we walk behind them they barely murmur anymore. 

 

Tree swallows, swooped over the pond, graceful streaks of blue, and flashed their white bellies as they switched direction.  As we rounded the pond to the farthest and most remote corner, we spooked the heron, who took off from the water with great, slow wing strokes. 

 

A little further into the woods and we heard the cacophony of a few coyotes.  Their howls are high pitched and eerie.

The sundown was the feature of another night.  A line of orange sunlight shone over the western notch and backlit the hills.  Piles of clouds in the east colored first gold, then orange, then rose, and faded into dark gray.  Reflections in the water were brighter than the colors in the sky.  The crescent moon shone in the western sky.   Every night that I have not brought a camera, we have had a beautiful sunset.

Tonight we were tired and sat for half an hour at a picnic table on goose beach watching turtles’ heads surface, gasp air, and then disappear in concentric rings of water.  We listened to the frogs – crickets, green frogs and last, the deep voiced bullfrogs.  Dragonflies darted, touching down to the water from time to time.  Fireflies rained upwards.  A movement caught the corner of my eye just as Ox said “Look, Jenny.”  A young raccoon, oblivious of us, sniffed around the picnic table five yards south of us; he was poking around for supper.   As he got closer to us, I got a little nervous and we stood up.  He startled, then waddled with deliberate speed behind the nearest trees.  He peeked out from behind a near tree, then from between two trees, and as we left so that he could dine, he climbed up the farthest tree.