“Too much of a good thing,” I recall thinking as I waited through the mild irony of being at the walk-in clinic for treatment of a balky tendon that had me on crutches. The “good thing” was my daily time on foot and on trails, a deep dependency. Some May days later, diagnosis complete, a way to hoped-for recovery outlined, I sat looking at my raised right leg and the boot that encased it from knee to toe.

“Just shave the ‘ec’ off ‘ecstatic’ and you’ve got my early summer,” I said to the newly leafy trees and no one else.

On the early July day when I took my first short walk, I was struck by the welling of emotion I felt when I reboarded the familiar, short connector trail that links my life to the Town Commons. I’ve been through this stretch a thousand times, but now I felt the soft duff underfoot and saw the green tunnel bend left anew. To be given the gift of return to a trail was breath-stopping. Suddenly, I was teary, with only the leafy passage as witness.

“It means that much,” I whispered, suddenly shy in these everyday woods.

Flow — wildlife and water

A few days later, in the early afternoon on one of this summer’s blue-sky days, I was propped outside at work in a chair that was angled toward that sky. Motion in my peripheral vision drew me down; the gray fox appeared as if conjured — one minute: open, leaf-backed air; the next: a fully-realized fox! We were fixed in mutual surprise, then assessment — “What’s … who’s that?”, we both wondered, followed by the more mundane and possessive, “What’s he doing here?”

A “green tunnel” that runs parallel to Mere/Mare Brook through Sandy Stott’s neighborhood. Sandy Stott photo

A clutch of chickens who live in our neighborhood offered a cliché as an answer. But the deeper one lay in our near brook. As is true in much of Brunswick, Mere/Mare Brook sidles through here on its way to the Harpswell Cove, gullying one stretch and spreading wetlands in another. Neither place in the watershed admits houses, and so we have a water-and-tree corridor for any number of four-footers — deer, foxes, coyotes, raccoons — to shift along and a way for a few of us two-footers, too. A branch of that corridor ran right by my chair.

And so: us. Our locked gaze lasted maybe 10 seconds. Long enough to cycle through the catalogue of threats. We both came up empty. I did take in his silvery-gray fur with its auburn fringe. What he saw is only a guess. The fox stepped back calmly into the green tunnel; I went back to my trail of words. But the air was (and is) still full of encounter. That has lasted. Every time I look up, I expect him.

Gift in the air

It’s a mild summer evening: long twilight, zephyr breeze, anticipation of music at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. For a number of local residents, this is summer’s heartland.

“Part of what joins us in this gathering, is hearing live music. It is of the moment,” said festival Co-director Phillip Ying in his welcoming remarks.

“Yes,” I recall thinking, “what we hear is being made, it is of vibrating air. And then gone. I have a seat fully in the present.”

Some evenings later, I am leaning forward in that seat in the single-row balcony of this intimate concert hall. The Miro String Quartet has reached the third movement of Argentinian composer Alberto Ginestera’s “String Quartet No, 1, Opus 20,” described as “Calmo et poetico” … well, yes, exactly, a slow, hypnotic change from the galloping strings of movements one and two. Some minutes ago, John Largess, the violist for the Miro, offered a brief introduction to the Ginestera Quartet, pointing us toward hearing our ways into the gaucho (read: cowboy) life, with its days and rhythms of riding and the roughness of outdoor life.

But now, right now, it is nocturne on the Pampas. It sounds like post-campfire time, full of the night noises and perhaps the night-mind wanderings of sleepers or those quietly awake under the night sky.

“I have,” I think as I listen with my eyes closed, “slept many nights outdoors.” Put more accurately, I have entered a half-sleep punctuated by forest and mountain sounds … some offered by fellow critters and some … from somewhere else. The strings playing in concert below me take me there.

Strangeness, yes, but not estrangedness. A gift in and of the air. So many ways to travel in a local summer.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chairperson of the town’s Conservation Commission and a member of Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.