Life plays little jokes on me, sometimes.

I notice them when I look to places that people forget to look. It's stopping myself from watching where my cautious feet will fall and letting my glance instead wander to the sky, to dive into it, to bathe in that great blue tinged expanse until, grinning, it reveals its secrets to me.

I was taking a lazy winter walk through the French countryside appreciating the scene I could have created around me. It was sunny and almost warm. I found myself peeling layers off and carrying my wool jacket and scarf. I let the wind to the talking and watched it rattle dry brown winter leaves left on the trees. It carried on it the slight smell of smoke which, as many things do, inundated my mind with childhood images, autumn days spent at the pumpkin patch, drawing hearts and feet on foggy bus windows, watching long winter shadows picking through a golden landscape.

Physically, my body was slowly advancing between two villages in a Pyrenean valley where soft greens filled hillsides framed by white-topped ridges far away. And hidden in thos dips and rolls you can still find churches built with stones, abandoned castle towers, and tiny villages with names like Ax or Ur. In and around them the sun seems to shine endlessly and every day feels like Sunday. Each house has an orchard in its yard with rickety fence lines adding more to the unity than the separation of things. I often looked up to see and older villager making his or her way slowly down the road. In this region, when you say hello they smile genuinely back hrough skin that resembles the valley ridges above.

I reached the next village and admired a few grand stone houses, listened to a creek gurgling somewhere, followed the birds with my eyes, turned myself around and painted the place in my head to have free access to it whenever I wanted. A church bell rang, reminding me of the restraints of time, and I turned back to the road.

Listening to two women speaking Catalan, I marveled at the perfection of the moment. I laughed lightly at myself realizing that Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" was running through my head, an ode to all that can not last and to the fickle memories that would fail to bring this day back to me in its entirety. Stories were forming in my head with rhymes and descriptions of leaves, fallen old power lines, brooks running below. My eyes followed the hillside on my right and flew up into the sky where I saw something that puzzled me enough to stop my feet...