Windy Pine Road

Do I feel safe? This is always something I think about when I decide to get lost in unfamiliar places. Compared to the city this seems like an empty landscape. But there is serenity for people here living. Yes, I feel safe. Let’s take a walk. To my left there’s a deer, close enough for me to take a picture – but no, I’d rather just watch quietly and leave her undisturbed. She may not want to see me. I walk in a circle, impossible to get lost. We are close to June, but nature has not found her Spring rhythm yet. No flowers, just bare and dry branches. It smells like winter still. The silence of the country roads leading up to the driveways leaves room for me to conjure the conversations inside the walls of all the houses I pass. With each home I hear imagined end-up-day family chats. The banality of these conversations I’m creating are superimposed with magic, for me – the outsider, me the foreigner, me the observer – they are different and fascinating. A noise behind me interrupts my conversations. I turn around, perhaps a local. But no- only a squirrel running on the leaves. As I turn to walk along Windy Pine Road I focus now on what is actually before me. Inotice the architecure. Each home is different from its neighbor; different sized, shapes, colors- all lake houses, but all somehow unique. I continue around the bend. Another house appears. “Why the flag?” I wonder. In my home, I never seen one outside the house, or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m not paying the same attention as when I’m in a new place, maybe I’m just wearing new pair of eyes. Perhaps the houses – I think- tell me everything about the people who live here. There are those who have the grass overgrown, those who still have to fix those broken windows or the paint peeling from the wood, those who have a big working tractor or a family car, those who have still chores undone, those who have built a small house for the birds and those who have decorate their own with wooden statues. Here, along this road, there are traces of all the lives I’m imagining. And these houses are simply homes. Around another turn. Another home. In the yard there are some old toys left. My thought continue as the clouds turn from white to grey and back again. I’ve seen this house before, or maybe not. The lake reflects the changing skies like a mirror of my wandering mind. I must have finished the circle around the lake.