10 September 2010

I slept a solid ten hours last night, and while I won’t say I woke up feeling refreshed necessarily, I didn’t spend the entire day yawning while I packed the last of the peaches, collected the crutches from beneath the pear trees, and put up more rodent guards.

For those of you who know me, you know that 1) I love Disney movies, and 2) I couldn’t sing my way out of a wet paper bag to save my life. I was here all by myself for most of the day, though, and it seemed as if no one were around for miles; so while I was walking through the orchard, the sky overcast, the rough sea visible in shining slivers through the woods, the wind chill and brisk, the gulls crying overhead, I burst into Colors of the Wind from Disney’s Pocahontas. I was gearing up for the chorus—And how high does the sycamore grow / If you cut it down, then you’ll never know / And you’ll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon—and I spun around, arms flung wide, breath of crisp air drawn to belt out the next line…and staggered to a halt, struck dumb, and for one mad moment convinced my voice had conjured a wolf from the very elements. Then the dubiety cleared and I realized that it was not a wolf that my words had called forth from the wild, but a husky sitting several feet from me, head tipped to one side as if he were trying to figure out what kind of creature had emitted that horrific cacophony of sound. Did you come to see what was dying? I asked him gleefully—a dog! Oh how I have missed canine companions since I’ve been here—and his tail thumped affirmatively. He was gorgeous with silvery black and white fur and those disquieting pale blue eyes that are so common to the breed. He had a collar on, and I discovered that his name was Balto. Not very original for a husky, but then, I have a chocolate Labrador named Cocoa, so I can't exactly judge anyone's lack of ingenuity. I was astonished to see on his tag an address in Massachusetts, but when I called the number listed I found out that his family is staying just down the road. He let me hug him one last time and then loped off into the woods towards the sound of his people’s voices calling for him. I was sad to see him go.