She’s gone out walking every day, for decades now, even when thunderstorms were rolling in or snow was starting to fall. When you walk everyday, you find things. Over the years she’s found many feathers; she takes them home and keeps them in a drawer beside her bed. Most a from the geese but she’s found ones from hawks, owls, cardinals, blue birds and one tiny polka dotted one from a woodpecker. Some of the feathers have a beautiful sheen, some look horribly worn out. What else does she see? Cigarette butts. Lots of those. Beer cans. An occasional Fireball bottle, once a coin from Aruba. Socks sometimes. People will say you ‘scared the socks off them.’ Was this person half scared? And many, many bags, containers, cups and what not from fast food places. How does that happen? Does someone eat their last French fry or take a last sip of their Mountain Dew and they just cannot have this garbage in their car one second more?
Tuesday was different. That day there was a tiny piece of the most vivid cerulean blue fabric laying in the road. Torn on all sides. How did it get there? Was a bird building a nest? Was someone sitting in the backseat, bored from a long drive, tearing pieces of their top off, when they decided to hold it in the breeze of the open window and it blew away? Was someone walking and a snapping turtle attacked them? Or the geese? She was attacked by a goose once who wanted some of her sandwich. It’s fun to wonder how something ended up where we find it, everything has a story. She couldn’t think of where she would put it or why she would keep it at all; she just left it there. By the next day it was gone.
We have thoughts about things we see all the time. We think about something, imagine something, and then it sinks into the depths of our mind, not lost, just tagged and archived until the mind, sometimes for obvious reasons and sometimes not, will ferry it back to the surface. Many months later (for now it was winter as she would never go down by the lake in summer, not because she didn’t like to stand by the water but for the sole reason of avoiding the mosquitos who hatched out of the still water and the ticks waiting in the tall grass) she saw, draped over one of the rocks along the shore, another piece of cerulean blue fabric. This was a much larger piece but torn on all sides like the smaller piece. It looked as though it had been there for a long time, not years, just as long ago as the piece she saw laying in the road. In rain, in sun, during the early dusting of snow two weeks ago. She imagined it would be difficult to pull off the rock, maybe impossible, that’s how it looked. How did it get there? Now instead of thinking of a birds nest or a bored child, she wondered if there was a body in the lake.