Grateful for the River

Today I am grateful for the River.

Yesterday I went kayaking at Mallows Bay, MD. It’s an amazing site, dozens of scuttled ships so completely returned to the earth that most of them are just strips of plantlife. And what plant life! the flora was amazing. I didn’t take the camera, but will hopefully get some of my friend’s videos to share. In the aerial photo below, you can see the boat-outlines, each one a 250 ft WW I ship, left here in 1925. Yesterday was warm but not hot, bright but not sunny, a gentle day when the river was calm and smooth. The birds were, of course, wonderful and plentiful. Big herons that look and sound like pterodactyls, snobby cormorants, sticking their noses in the air, seagulls atop every channel marker, and the big messy assemblages of osprey nests complete with squalking young uns. Every old ship outline was green with shrubs: spicebush, willow, cedar, and mallows, mallows, mallows! They”re nearly done with their bloom now, but still enough to enchant. Large, open white hibiscus blossoms with blood red throats, in great clumps. Also, milkweed, tickseed sunflower, cardinal flower all growing together.

The river holds my heart. I am always aware of that moving water, that stream of life.