Remember what peace there may be in silence.

So I took that fine advice yesterday afternoon and went down to Eden Mill Nature Center for an hour and half walk by Deer Creek. I arrived around 3:30. The curdled sky hung low over the landscape, and a frigid northwest wind barreled down the creek valley. It cleared away the tatters of whatever pain remained in me, leaving behind only peace and contentment. From a boardwalk bench near the dam’s spillway, I faced west and watched a pair of red-tailed hawks soar and dip, feint and glide, over the floodplain, one of them finally flapping away upstream to land in the trees below the ridgeline, followed soon by the other. The scant light faded, too, the sun dropping at last into a keyhole slot between horizon and the cloud bank’s bottom edge, unlocking hues of mercurochrome and flamingo pink on the bellies of the clouds. Somehow the day, with its sweeping cold, breathed through me. It left me clear in a way I had not been before. For me, the vast silence of winter does that. Dana Knighten

I, too, go out in the cold for clarity like none other. Thanks, Dana