To be inside a fish’s October dream — there are worse fates!

We took the long way around Ellis Pond, stopping to observe a kingfisher pair. Big dark heads, a call like a rattle and wings that opened smartly as scissors. We looked for the Great Blue Heron, but didn’t see him — or her — solitary dweller in the stream and weeds.

There’s no problem the wind and rain can’t solve, even the November wind and rain. The wind and rain can’t name the problem, can’t diagnose it, can’t prescribe, yet they can, shall we say, dissolve it.

My favorite glimpse was a blaze of forsythia growing up between two dark-clad Norway spruces. The spruces have always reminded me of a certain kind of minister or undertaker, while the yolky yellow interlude was like a kid’s laughter in a stern church.

Matching my gait to my thoughts (or was it the other way around?), I realized that one part of freedom was what I was experiencing right then: the removal of arbitrary constraints.

A winter garden holds as much spring as spring itself, the way the pause before speech holds as much speech as the flow of words that follows.