Her destination was a particular point by a small brook, which she had discovered at the beginning of the summer. She rarely visited this spot because the path to it was a linear one. She preferred to walk in circles. Usually her hikes headed out from the day’s beginning in one direction and ended by coming home from the opposite direction. Straight lines bothered her. Retracing the steps she’d already taken was redundant. Anne found little grace in the shape of the back-and-forth walk.
But sometimes it wasn’t grace she sought. On some days, she sought solace. And little or no spot offered comfort and solace, and protection, on quite the scale as the little spot by the brook before which she now found herself standing, all underfoot slippery leaves and wobbly rocks forgiven as she stopped and breathed and let the water fall in on her ears, slowing her, soothing her so much, and so swiftly, that in an instant before she knew where she was, she wanted nothing more than to drop to her knees and then to her belly and then to curl up for a deep, deep nap there by the brookling brook.
To the right of the path, the water welled up in a small pool, into which the brook spilled from a series of rock-formed waterfalls. It was the pluck-pluck call of the water from the far side of the mossy rocks into this small pool that Anne found so mesmerizing. When she had first seen this spot it had been enough for her to stand on the path and admire the tiny waterfalls and crystal-clear pool, shrouded from the glare of high noon by the indigo hemlock fronds rising in a military stand on the northern flank of that damp and shaded slope.
But today she stood on the path and weighed the force of her urge to nap against the solid attraction of one particular rock higher up the water fall against the risk of the treacherous leaves that lay in between her fatigue and the rock’s attraction. She knew not what lay underneath those leaves. Just to sit, that’s all she wanted. To sit. To not think, for just a minute. To not think.
She toed the ground.
What would the scarecrow man with the orange jacket do? What would Rachel do? What would dear Richard do?
And so pretending she was anybody but herself, Anne Dexter stepped off the path.
It took her ten minutes, but she did reach the rock higher up. She was a careful person, that much was certain. But finally she attained her destination. She stepped onto the flat rock ledge, looking about her at the falling water, the hemlocks, the pale blue sky peeking through.
She lay down on the rock. Without thinking, she fell asleep
When she woke up just a short while later, she felt something different. Aside from her sore hip, she felt, just, different. She felt alone, most definitely, but also ready to not be alone.
From her spot, she could see a green that hovered just beyond the reach the of the hemlock trunks. The forest floor? She squinted. She dropped back her head. She widened her eyes. She took in her breath, lest it be stolen by what she saw.
What she thought might be the forest floor rising through the trees up a steep hill was no forest floor. It was a rock. The largest of all the rocks around. The largest of all the rocks she’d ever seen. A house was the first thing that came to mind. The rock was a big as a house. Maybe not Jim’s new house or Rachel’s old house, but possibly the size of her little middle-aged house by the Green River. And she hadn’t seen the rock at first because it was entirely grown over in a thick coating of heavy green moss. It was a fine year for moss.
There the rock was. There the rock had always been, staring her in the face. She had not even seen it. How could there be such an impossibly large rock just tossed here in a jumble of already very large rocks beside this wee little brook meandering on the far side of her feet.
For the first time in a long awhile, she found herself wishing Richard were with her. Her mate there, to help her to make her way across the ditches and sinkholes to the large rock, someone who could help her to climb the rock, to best it, to sit astride it.
As it was, she could get nowhere near it. She had her limits, even on this extraordinary day, that she did know.
And so she stared and stared at the rock, trying to memorize the heft and weight and looming impossibility of this moss-covered behemoth.
The path homeward, when at length she regained it, suddenly seemed entirely beside the point. There was now only one way to go and that was back where she’d come from. For the first time since she could remember, she would retrace her steps and redo the thing with pleasure and with grace. Never a word used much in her vocabulary, again had become a word she would begin to use more often.
Linda Stevenson
November 2011
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