For more than three years
I walked my beagles in the same place every day:
A place of looping wooded trails,
bordering a meadow,
owned by a local corporation.
“How can you always walk in the same place?”,
my wife said to me.
“It’s never really the same”, I said.
“There is always something new to see”.
Indeed, one day there would be
a little bufflehead diving in the pond;
or there would be a dragonfly nymph
crawling up out of the water on the stalk of a reed,
ready to transform into a winged adult;
or a red-crested woodpecker hammering at a dead fir.
Something that had always been there
could catch my eye in a new way:
glistening spider webs caught in morning sun;
an oddly shaped tree where a branch
replaced the lost treetop by growing vertically;
ants shuttling up and down a tree
to tend their aphids high above.
I could even choose to walk the route
the other way round
and change the view
into an almost-new place.
Best of all
I could watch the year
transform my familiar landscape
as if I were a human time-lapse camera
recording it all.
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