the tone of precious things

Trillia, mayapples, the possibility of muskrats—these are what we’re in the woods hunting for; these are his joys. The “oh, look!” and then “careful where you step!” when he spots a gentle forest slope covered in the purple blossoms of his favorite wildflower come out with the same tenderness he reveals when speaking to his puppies and little grandchildren. This is the tone of precious things, of life’s simplest yet richest delights. Soon he is tiptoeing along a fallen tree, standing almost in the river, and studying the mud banks alongside it for the right sort of paw prints, the right sort of holes. When I was a child, we always saw muskrats along the Chattahoochee; but Atlanta is more populated now, the paths along the river speckled with trash and trodden by dogs. We are lucky if we come across raccoon tracks now. We are lucky if the sound of traffic on the highway overpasses up river dies down, if all we hear in the air for a moment is the honking of geese calling to one another from rocks spread across the slow-tumbling whitewater.

In those quiet moments, we both attune our ears to the rustling of the new leaves above us; we adjust our eyes to the brown of the branches around us, the brown of the dried leaves under our feet, the brown of the hairy vines that will soon sport the lush green leaves of poison ivy. I spot a blue bird in a nearby tree; he a blue heron on the far side of the river. As I stumble over a patch of small star-like flowers, whose petals I count so I can look them up in a field guide later, he lifts a rock slowly, ready to catch a lizard whose pattering footsteps atop the mat of leaves have caught his attention.

This is how we enjoy the woods, my father and I. It doesn’t matter if we have walked this same path twenty or thirty times over the course of our lives; if we have seen these birds before, these flowers before. Something always awaits us. This time, it is the plethora of trillia; on another visit, it might be the first burst of color on the red buds, the fresh opening of leaves on the hickories, or the slow gliding of a hawk across the sky. Something of the natural world always awaits us—something that persists despite all the intrusions of humanity upon it. There is a massive earth beneath and around us, which he has always revered. So too has my mother. If there is one thing they have in common, it is this way of looking. This way of understanding. This tone of tenderness in their voices when they first see, then examine, then know something small, rich, and exciting in the natural world. This is how they raised me; what they raised in me. It is the legacy of their marriage, now long ago ended; the legacy of what united them long enough to bring me into this magnificent world with my eyes and ears open, my curiosity bursting forth like fire, illuminating many things.