It can mean unmoored, which has a negative cast. A seacraft untethered and adrift. People disconnected from the beings and world around them.
But, like John Hiatt’s red-tailed hawks, it can also mean soaring, not constricted in movement or by gravitational pull. Floating and exploring in wide open spaces. In free flight, not freefall.
Sails and netting unfurling and clouds and banners weaving their way across a cloudless sky. Ribbons of fish. Animals safely roaming.
Unbounded.
Sea lions voguing. Starlings’ murmurations.
Voices carrying, over time and space. In gentle reminders and spirited song and animated discussion.
The more rarefied the vantage point, the rarer (and hence ordinarily overlooked) is the view.
I once followed waterfalls, hiking through woods to a mountaintop garden in New Hampshire’s Ossippee Mountain Range. The mountains were rendered in green at street level, but bathed in bright blue from on high.
This rose stretched exuberantly at the Castle in the Clouds that Father’s Day. Like an outgoing youngest child in a large family, it launched itself above its brethren and refused to be overlooked.
It was not so very far from Mt. Washington, which my husband and I had tried to climb on our 15th wedding anniversary. Ultimately we had to give up on seeing the sights from the highest vantage point in New Hamspshire available to mere mortals. I had insufficient ballast, and was no match for fierce winds across a broad open expanse of rock. It was too difficult to hold onto my steady spouse, and I was nearly swept off the mountain’s face.
(The nearby Mt. Washington Hotel is sometimes mistaken for a very different overlook: The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel; I can assure you the White Mountains’ version is far more serene).
Sometimes I have found myself in thinner air, overlooking a golden world as the sun sets. Or walking through seas of swirling pastel clouds atop Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain, taking in the Northeast’s crown view of a rising sun.
In more recent years, I’ve looked over land and sea and sandscapes from atop camels and towering dunes. From watchtowers and volcanic islands. I’ve surveyed ancient blue and pink cities and violet seas from slitted holes in stone castles and fortresses.
From a distance of many years, I realize I’ve found myself climbing ever-farther upwards on such days.
At dizzying heights, I feel closer to my missing piece. He frequently took photos from such spots when he was here with us, on “earth, our heaven, for a while.” Words I read from Mary Oliver’s “A Pretty Song” at his service.
In some ways, we can best see what we’re missing from on high. Where the heady view is also heavenly.
A man looking out over the City of Lights with his daughters, not knowing it would be the last time. The same man on a Equatorial island cliff, knowing it was for the last time, and seeing the rarest of Pacific nesting birds.
One of my children recently told me of Sgùrr Dearg, where we earthbound folks may survey both very present Puffins and great swaths of the visible world from the Inaccessible Pinnacle.
If she climbs it someday, I hope she’ll send me a picture of what she overlooks.
That day, a Saturday, set a high-temperature record in Boston at the moment our wedding ceremony began. It was only 99 degrees then.
Today, there is melancholy rain, and tornado warnings in Middlesex County. Since then, on the other side of the world and in temperatures in the mid 120s, my footwear has come close to being entombed in melting streets.
That day we were students. You remained a student all your life, not just up-to-date but creatively forward-thinking. You were considering going back for another degree when you were diagnosed. While you were devoted to helping and healing, my work made me a student of the immeasurable harm people intentionally inflict on others.
Today I’m still trying hard to learn new things. Our children continue to point me in the right directions and educate me. Pure mathematics and theoretical physics, spillover viruses, computer engineering. Books and languages and art and endless music. Kindness and attention to all living creatures.
That day you were at my side. Even today, I cannot wrap my mind around the thought you would not always be.
Fences are said to make good neighbors, but they provide many other services, including considerable photographic opportunities. They help keep our beagles from escaping while chasing scents. My husband once forwarded me an account of an undoubtedly well-meaning beagle who was recovered–in Indiana–after more than two years on the lam and 850 miles from his fence-free home. My husband’s header: “I wonder how far the rabbit got?”
“En guard” is spoken to alert fencers to take their defensive positions, but fences themselves need not be uninviting. They lend scale to and break up the vastness of landscapes. They mark paths and house buoys and tchotchkes and seasonal displays. They are backdrops for posters and banners, and display political sentiments and commercial enticements.
While birds frequently situate themselves comfortably on fences, a fence-sitting human tends to be one unwilling to commit to one side of an issue or another.
For the attentive, an unusual fence can identify the particular place in the world of an otherwise undifferentiated seascape or skyscape.
They may be whole or broken, winding or at strict high alert. Antique or modern. Functional or decorative. Enduring or flimsy, or somewhere in between. Sometimes they completely block one’s view. Others are so porous as to be nearly invisible, wrought of wire that melts into its surroundings. Lush summer flowers may exuberantly burst through their grids.
Sometimes, fences are so perfectly situated within their surroundings that they seem to echo the sky.
Love in the Spaces 