Late morning, sitting on the hardpack at the edge of the ravine.
A perfect confluence of city and forest in the soundscape: the stream below, a steady liquid presence, shrill birdcall, slight crackle of leaf-fall, no wind, only a very slight breeze. And traffic from the road, a steady pulse of tires in perpetual doppler ascension and descension, an earth mover, its metal blade grinding heavy against asphalt somewhere over the far rise, and small aircraft flying low toward the Sound.
A bright yellow leaf falling in the band of sunshine now directly over the stream. Its course is unusual, slow, at a sight angle from vertical, it falls twenty feet, pauses strangely, then twenty feet more—and then reverses course in a way that shocks me until I realize it isn’t a leaf after all.
A butterfly.
