The Perfect Day

As today is my birthday, I treated myself to extra time on the bridge.  I was not alone.  At about 4:30 in the afternoon, the bridge shook with the footsteps of tourists.  With foliage near the height, clear skies and a temperature near seventy, our covered span draws visitors like honey bees to pollen.  Many choose to stand on the triangle of grass by the intersection with Rt. 4, pointing cameras at the Middle Bridge, today with the flaming leaves above and beyond it.  I don't blame them. The beauty today called for digital memories.

Lingering, I checked the level of the river as measured by a sizable chunk of wood, like a fence post, caught by some rocks on the north shore.  Over the past days more and more of it lies out of the water.  We have had little rain lately, so more rocks pop above the surface, and seem larger as the days pass.

Lower water and rocky stretches turns a placid flow into braided, frothy ripples.  One such stretch appears just west of the bridge, evidenced by an endless archipelago of island shaped foam remnants.  Like snowflakes, each one is made of the same fleeting stuff, yet all are different.  Seen from the bridge, they flow along, floating land forms, bristling with rounded headlands. 

Sailing leaves outnumbered the foam shapes today.  Seen from the bridge, fleets of them, mostly maple, serenely passed.  Drying leaves curl, and so create a coracle shape, perfect for floating down stream.  As the water comes under the bridge the swiftest current is on the left, then some feet beyond, it shifts to the middle and then the other side.

I watched a small spade-shaped yellow leaf fall from the tree overhanging the river at the south end of the bridge.  I followed it down.  It landed in a shallow reach where the current barely pushed.  My leaf edged slowly downstream and toward the middle.  Leaves and froth moved in a swifter way just a few feet out, but this one inched along with its fellows in the shallows.  Then their pace quickened and my leaf joined the faster parade of maple vessels heading east and out of sight.