Amanda Cleary Eastep
I never know what may meet me over the mountain in the morning. It isn’t the crows anymore—just the sunrise.
Maybe a sliver of yellow light between the bluish peaks and the gray clouds until it’s shoved back by January’s insistence on muted greens and rusts and blacks. Maybe an orange and pink blaze I wouldn’t notice catching the branches of the distant oaks if I weren’t walking the dog up the trail that is cut into the side of the hill behind our house.
This path is a treat for my herding dog, Annie, because it leads into the woods and the place where the snow has been melted down to dead pine needles by the bodies of sleeping deer. I don’t follow her eager snout that sniffles and snuffles farther along into the towering pines. Instead, I stand on the ledge-like trail…
Read the rest of my essay, The Generosity of Crows and Old Women, at Cultivating Oaks Press:
Photo by Kevin Mueller on Unsplash
Amanda Cleary Eastep 