“If I know a song of Africa ”¦ does Africa know a song of me?”  ”“ Out of Africa, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

I could ask the same question of this place, whether it knows I’m here and if it will remember me after I’ve gone. Do these trees watch my every move and wonder at my unspoken thoughts as I have theirs for a dozen years now? Have they stayed awake as I have just to hear or see what might move about in these woods when the rest of the world sleeps? I wish I could tell them what they’ve meant to me, especially when they were often all I had to keep me grounded, taking from them what shreds of steadfastness and resoluteness as I was able to during trying times.

How can I tell them at those moments when words escape me?

I listen some nights, long after the distant hiss of traffic has faded from the main road, eager for the owl’s hoot or the fox’s bark, turning on the backyard light hoping to see something moving about, something that tells me that I am not, after all, alone. I follow the fireflies’ pinpoints of light as they move among the shrubbery and follow the motion of bats, dark shapes circling beneath the night sky.

If it is possible to love a place, then I have surely loved this one, pledging all of my senses to all that exists here, from the scent of the yellow lily growing along the woods’ edge to the sight of the wee hummingbird flitting from flower to flower. I turned the back porch light on once not long after I’d first arrived and saw a flying squirrel perched atop a bird feeder, its large round eyes fixed on an intruder whose actions it wasn’t sure of.

And during an early walk one summer day, I came upon a spider’s web gilded in dew gems twinkling in the sunlight. I’ve seen tree limbs etched across full moons and listened to the coyote’s mournful howl. I’ve seen storms bending trees into submission and have stood by in awe as a mother squirrel, chased by a cat, dashed into the woods carrying one of its young in her mouth to safety. I’ve seen stars fall into the treetops and snowflakes sparkle on their way to earth on a sun-washed morning. And if it possible to be in love with what is not human, if it possible to be forever bound, if only in spirit, to such wonders as I’ve seen, then I surely am.

Is this place aware that I cannot, will not, rest, as long as there are wonders to behold even in the shadows? Will it, like Blixen’s Africa, sing a song of me after I’ve gone?

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.