Rattlesnake Hill

RATTLESNAKE HILL Meshoppen Township, Pennsylvania Every high summer has a magical day when the forests and fields are impossibly green, bathed sun-up to sundown in a yellow-gold light made lazily kinetic by high-soaring hawks, busy beavers and bees, the ever-cautious deer, the shadow of the bear The music from the kitchen is “Samba Para Ti” somehow softly Santana in the early afternoon where community names like Meshoppen, Dark Hollow, Mehoopany, Black Walnut, Tunkhannock and South Auburn are a tapestry of stories over steep, rolling land where a young married couple gathers hay on our hill, from their tractor and wagon a wave and a smile, their two mixed-breed dogs are loyal and loping and part of the team and this grateful community celebrating the sounds and the tangled choreography of hunting and mating, of nurturing and feeding, of farming and family in our forested ridges of feathers and fur, the Susquehanna River full of webbed feet and fins; my wife in the meadow, her mid-summer aura of honey on ivory accented with red, talking to the grasses, to the birds, to the trees, the sounds of spirit voices, something sacred in the breeze On the porch of the farmhouse, I sit, an aging man at ease, feeling blessed and content, watching Nature’s conversations with her sun-drenched creations on the bountiful, beautiful, fertile green slopes of Rattlesnake Hill Emanuel Carter