Smiles of a Monday Morning

Yeah. Okay. Sure. We got some snow. Two days of it. But what a mess! Gloppy, sloppy, heavy as mud. And tonight we're supposed to get rain. Not the kind of stuff it's fun to play in. I started to get kind of grumpy today, but then I remembered Monday. Here's what it looked like on Monday. Bright sun, blue river, little woodland streams dancing and singing in the sunlight.

What a perfect day it was to take my friend for a drive. Due to progressive illness, he doesn't get out on his own anymore, but I thought he might enjoy driving along the Hudson in search of eagles. So that's what we did. We even got out of the car and walked for a while in the woods. He seemed to enjoy that. Like me, he spent as much time in the woods as he could, as a kid. Even now, we felt just a little bit younger, walking beside a sweet little brook, seeing the sunlight sparkle on the snow-covered ground, hearing the chickadees call to each other high in the hemlock trees.

When my friend was younger and in good health, we would never have walked together through the woods like this. His idea of fun was to push himself to his limit, riding his bike up the highest hills, skiing faster than anyone else, seeking the challenge of climbing mountain peaks. It would have driven him nuts to walk at my pace, spending an hour to amble a quarter mile, poking about in the weeds to see who lived there, or standing silent for minutes on end to hear the sounds of the forest. But on Monday, we got along fine.

We even saw an eagle! And just when we'd given up. We had walked along the river until my friend grew tired and suggested we'd better return to the car. At that very moment I noticed the shadow of a very large bird moving across the snow. Oh look! I said, and we both looked up, and there was our eagle, wings outspread, soaring just 20 feet or so above our heads. Wow! That made our day! And my friend's big grin has kept me glowing since then. When the weather threatens to make me grumpy, I just remember that smile.