While most of my posts are more ag-related, here is something I wrote in January for a Writing the Land class with author and professor Dawn Wink. Her book “Meadowlark” made a lasting impression. Folks who know me, know I love birds. These photos, and the experiences attached to them, inspired this writing in the midst of the coldest winter in memory. I offer it today on National Wildlife Day.

So put yourself into this moment… and fly away!

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Dozens of plover playfully turned and twisted in the breeze as she looked toward the horizon of sea marsh teaming with life. A cacophony of birdsong drifted over the sound of the current caressing the shoreline as the sun kissed the glassy azure sky — staining it with a steamy haze.

She breathed deeply. The moist and salted air blanketed her in tranquility.

The sand — besmirched by scattered strands of blackened green and gold, cold and clammy against her skin — slid shimmering and sprightly between her toes as she plunged her feet into its silky solitude. Dawn’s glow seeped through her skin into her muscles as though to reach her very bones, wrestling away the stiff and weary chill that had settled there.

She saw the long-fallen army of weathered wood — mere skeletons of their former selves — scattered about the island’s one giant sentinel. As the brush of morning painted away the night, she saw the solitary tree rising above the crowd of scrubs below. Its full head of foliage offered a kingly perch to the bird who would land there, watchful of the morn.

The silence gave way to the whir of a thousand wings trumpeting the night gone. Taking flight as one, their presence echoed as they vanished to distant particles of windswept sand. She would take wing in the silence of their wake, if not for the flutter of ten thousand wings at her core. Every nerve within her said “fly away.”

She could hear nothing but the beat of her own heart — deafening it was to her in that moment as the sand covered her feet.

—S.Bunting (c) January 2014