Day 81
wildlife
I deeply love this word, which combines two spectacular words: wild, and life. We quickly think of bears and foxes, elephants and tigers, apes and toucans. Wildlife is a word for animals that live in the spaces we have not infringed upon, too much, or not yet. It is a form of life that still lives within habitats that we can imagine are untouched by our far-reaching hands; though this is increasingly not true.
I not-so-secretly long to be them. There are mornings when I stand at my front door and look out at the woods across the road and imagine the temperature of the ground, the moisture in the grasses. Using the memories of this ground and grass against my bare feet, I place myself there, curled against the base of a massive pine, ready to sleep after a night of hunting. The simplicity is what I long for.
My husband told me last night, as we were falling asleep, that he saw two young bear cubs running across a nearby meadow a couple of days ago. We always report our wildlife sightings to each other; as if to remind ourselves that by proximity we are not altogether tamed.
