Packing up on Fire Island

You'll have to embiggen the picture and look very hard to see them, but in the photo above there are three deer lying down in the grass in a cranberry bog in Fire Island Pines called Smoky Hollow. You hardly ever see deer resting like this in the sun, but the warmth must have felt welcome after days and days of rain; they must have been drying off. One had an especially sleepy look to her; she perked up a bit when she heard us walking on the boardwalk nearby, but then she couldn't keep her eyes open in the drowsy warmth of the afternoon light.

We'd gone out to the Pines to move lots of stuff out of the house -- books, papers, clothes, the more personal stuff that's accumulated there over three years. The house is on the market, and I'm glad we've moved on. But today did make me think about the things I've liked about it: the ubiquitous deer, the way the ancient-looking snapping turtles put us in a kind of a trance as we watched, they were so energized with sex and spring. Their shells looked blue, just under the surface of the pond, and when they swam into water that wasn't as murky as the rest you could see their tails and their big eagle-like heads. We walked to Cherry Grove for lunch, when we'd finished packing up, and a catbird followed us in the branches beside the path, hurrying from branch to branch a little ahead of us, curious.

And then we hopped on the four o'clock boat, and before you know it the majority of our stuff was back on this side of the Great South Bay. On the other side of all this moving, already apparent, is a new prospect of serenity.