I spent my lunch hour perched on a rock by the river, a book open in my lap. But I alternated between the lazy scrolling of words on the page and the black butterflies drifting through the kudzu. Leaf-shaped, silver-sided fish glinted along the fallen logs in the shallows below me. Three turtles scrambled up on a half-submerged tree, and I spent a lot of time watching their backs dry in the sun. A secretive rustling in the leaves at my feet eventually materialized into a long, blue-tailed lizard who clawed delicately over a neighboring rock.
I was struck by how still everything was - almost as if the river absorbed unnecessary sounds and swirled them off downstream. Even the traffic up the hill from me was hushed. It was a beautiful christening of the first day of autumn, a cool drink of the peace I crave, a tree-filtered sunshine afternoon.
**Headline taken from Ann Beattie's essay, "Melancholy and the Muse" in Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression, by Nell Casey (2003).
