You forget how big hares are, when they’re just a word you’re using. But as we were sitting there watching the evening slowly, slowly die, one of them came crashing through the underbrush to take a look at us before loping down the path to the road.

“Hmph,” you could practically see him think as he had to detour around the car. What are they doing here again?

And then twenty yards from the deck where we sat watching, the sun slowly gave up its struggle to shine through the woods. Then it was dusk and it was pretty easy to imagine that you might see the animals that truly do live there. But this day there were no elk or deer, just the ghost memories of them.

It made you consider as we sat in this little Paradise, what the animals might be thinking if they were the sort to do that. How they might fret and grumble about what humans are doing to their world. And it must be said, that in this place, at this cabin, very little, life is lived according to Nature, there’s very little other than our quiet presence to disturb it…

But so many things are threatened. And it seems that people need to push at the edges. There’s an osprey off on an island, and they’ve reserved that island to him. but if you don’t think people need to park their fishing boat right at the very boundary of the forbidden…

Now when life is so slow, it’s easier to hear Mother Earth inhale and exhale; easier to see her beauty; easier to worry about the ways we degrade her.

I wonder why I live so far from Nature when I’m back at my home? And those hares? They’re HUGE! You had to think about Monty Python.