My tracks in and my tracks out in the year's briefest light. Yet, in my own company, which includes the cats and the dog, the day felt as full as ever.
The dog ran the deer trails, nose to the snow. The Pinkertons, as I've come to call the cats, stood guard at the breathing holes, totems to lethal patience.
Thoreau was there, too. I read him by candlelight until the shades of night took possession of the woods. We live too fast and coarsely. And he was right, as usual. Even still, even still, and worse.
He wrote that in 1852 when, in the village, sleighs were propped on poles to keep the rails from freezing to the ground, which seems neither fast nor coarse. O, if he could haunt the internet just now and see what we've become, our accounts far from fitting on our thumbnails.
We left the woods at last, the Pinkertons, the dog, and me. Clouds in the west had arranged themselves in converging bars according to the tactics of the sky, and the pink of the solstice sunset had lifted off of them and onto corrugations overhead; the snow-covered hill itself submitted to the sentiments of endings and blushed a little.
We took the long way home. Slower, finer. You could call it a resolution. You could call it a small beginning.
