No photos because I packed the cameras. Moving day is today, closing is tomorrow. We will be migratory until we buy our next house on Dec. 6.

Yesterday at twilight my eldest daughter and I saw an owl fly across the pond from a tree near the pondhouse toward the red maple swamp. Not sure what kind, but around here we most often hear the “who cooks for you?” of the barred owl.

I remember the first summer we lived here, 1998, hearing that owl on warm nights with the windows open and feeling close to the woods, close to wild things.

It has been a very special place to live. We will miss it.

Sojourns in the Parallel World Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension—though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.