When I was a kid, parents could still release their kids upon the world in morning’s sun with a simple, “Be back by suppertime.” We were free to wander the nearby pine thickets, brier patches, train tracks and trickling streams. We wanted to go to spots where our bikes had to be abandon; hastily pushed into the broom sage field to hide them. Yes, bikes were stolen back then but that was our worst fear; we felt safe otherwise. Each day was a pilgrimage and the destination was of little importance. I was searching for something to surprise, to quicken interest, to justify my prowling barefoot and shirtless through terrain replete with sharp stones, briars, thorns and snakes and I, or we, often did.

Once, Charlie and I found a huge, dead frog and decided to dissect him. We, or at least, I learned more about biology (and guilt) that day than I would ever learn in a classroom. I also learned that persimmons sucked and muscadines were divine and that reaching to pick blackberries from a bush and suddenly seeing a king snake stretched along the length of the very cain you were about to touch could make you run faster than any amount of training or blood doping.

Now, in my seventies and putting-off a knee replacement, my walks are limited to walking my dog in our neighborhood. Luckily, it is an old subdivision with many lots, too low to build on, left in woods and undergrowth. A few days ago I saw something I would have hiked days to see if that were possible. I remember lamenting several time over the past few years that I had never seem an owl in the wild despite many years of bird-watching (purely amateurish in execution). That day I saw one, a block away from my house; not just a little screech-owl sitting on a limb but a huge Great Horned Owl sitting atop a dead opossum just off the roadway. There was one of those movie moments when the frame is frozen and nothing moves, not even a breeze. I turned my head for an instant to check my dog’s response. I looked back and the owl was gone; silently he had vanished leaving his opossum and a memory I will always have; well, at least for a long while.  Walk with open eyes and heart; amazing things hid in plain sight.