I watched an osprey teach her young to fly today. The nest is in a tree next to the post office parking lot in the village, and normally I wouldn’t notice for the car engines and the people coming and going from the hardware store across the road, but the mother’s call was quick and loud from high above the pine. The offspring moved out over a higher branch, then she fluttered out into the deep end of the sky for a moment until she Woodstocked her way back to the nest. I could have watched for hours.

A deer came out of the marsh woods on my walk. It stopped, frozen, and looked at me like she wondered if I could see her just ten yards away. I stood still until she nibbled on some grass. When I took one step she galloped back into the brush, leaving me alone and suddenly at peace.

I moved past the tall reeds at the edge of the marsh where it meets the river, and a heron stood ankle deep and did not move as I walked by.

An elderly woman at the convenience store called from her car window as I walked toward the store and asked if I’d mind bringing her a bag of ice for her cooler in the back seat. She had a disabled vehicle tag and clearly could not walk from her car onto the curb, let alone carry ice, so I did so, and I noted her northern accent. Worcester. I mentioned my life there, both in and just north of town, and we talked for thirty minutes. She remembered the health club I managed. She knew of the mountain. Time slipped out of joint again.

An old friend texted and suggested we get together. He lives near DC and I said perhaps later this month. “It’s been too long,” he said. It takes very little to change the tone of a person’s day. He did that today.

Another very dear friend sent a picture of him holding his new grandson. When we were young, forty-two years ago, he had told me about the previous summer he spent riding his bike through Ireland. His eyes were alive and full of life, like it was something everyone should do; something he might even do summer after summer. In this picture he sent holding his daughter’s son, his eyes were alive like that.

Today I noticed unexpected flowers pushing through the soil.

Yesterday it rained and I watched it on the river for quite some time. It felt good to be so present.

I sat this afternoon on the patio drinking tea while listening to The Piano Guys and writing a piece for a newspaper about how we are focusing on the wrong things—all of us, the whole planet, focusing on the absolute wrong ideas. The writing was pretentious and arrogant; I need to humiliate it a bit, so tonight I put on Jackson Browne and it is starting to make sense. That moment, this, now, when something I want on the page has trouble leaping from my mind, but then the right song (Sky Blue and Black) pushes it out and what I meant spills across the screen. That’s when it feels good to push through the hard parts.

My father’s picture on the wall downstairs. He’s holding an oar in the air; he is twenty-seven, he is in a canoe and my mother, his newlywed in the photo, took the picture. He is laughing hard.

In the picture he is thirty-six years younger than I am now. I said, “It is hard to believe he was ever that young,” but I quickly realized it is hard to believe that I was ever that young.

That’s when I went for a walk and saw the deer, and the heron. That’s when I noticed the flowers I didn’t even know were growing there.