It’s been fifteen years. (How time passes when… time passes.) For our anniversary celebration yesterday, we hiked the long loop at Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve.
At first there were meadows with Hill Country vistas. There were wildflowers, yellow and purple, many of which we could identify and marveled at but some of which we had never seen before.
The trail descended from the hilltop into a valley where the vistas disappeared and Junipers and Oaks closed in around us. The ground was soft from the recent rains. The air was fresh. The breeze was cool. The water of the creek was clear with water bugs skimming across mirrored pools where the course turned and disappeared from view.
After we had begun our climb back out of the valley, we sat by the water fall, where the gentle stream spreads out on a broad limestone shelf before tumbling over the edge into a deep pool. There was emerald green moss. There were Maidenhair Ferns. There were Sycamores and American Elms. And there were frogs clicking from hidden places somewhere beyond the pond.
As we finished, the sun was slanting thru the trees sending golden streaks across the yellow and purple bedecked meadows. The stresses of the day had somehow melted away.
And this morning the two of us woke up and looked at each other with mild surprise. We had slept thru the night and not woken up once, something that was cause for minor celebration — that and the beginning of the next fifteen years.