It’s a perfect day.

We walked up the gravel path, my girls and I. Rosalyn slightly unwilling and surly about the entire thing, Vivian bouncing and running ahead, Tigger in blue stripes and purple suede shoes. We walk the path we always do, past the blackberry and raspberry bushes, past where the caterpillars made their huge tent nest one year, past where the old husky used to bark our passage. We search for beavers and snakes near the bridge, resting lightly on the wood.

There’s wind but it’s bracing, with the slightest taste of winter upon it, shaking the early weakerthans from the trees. I wrap and tie my sweater around Rosalyn, so it fits like a cape, and she stops feeling the cool as easily she does, my water baby. The sun ripples through the leaves, green with all the attention this last fair weekend, and it falls upon us.

There’s a tiny hand in mine which squeezes how and again, or retracts, a thumb back into it’s mouth. There’s a miniature version of me, crowing into the late day sunlight, blessed by angels or sunspots as she whirls into this day.

We stumble up the soft yielding trails off the gravel, a world the girls gasp at.

“Nurse Logs” I point out.

Vivian wonders, Rosalyn wonders, what could that be?

“They give life,” I whisper, conscious of the implication, “They give life even when dead, allowing new things to grow from what it’s left behind. Nothing wasted, nothing disappears. A circle.”

The bigger things don’t matter. They’re merely fascinated by the idea that something dead can also mean something alive, and every ten feet “Nurse Log! COOOOL!” rings out.

The sun would pierce the tree tops, and beckon, the wind hands that reminded, a world conspiring to remind. My mind calling out “I love this. This, now, I love this world we’re made. Full of love and joy and wonder, even through all the hard things and the whining and the pouting. It’s all just perfect.”

And yes. It is.