This is the time of year that we wait for all winter. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge was a world of wonders this evening when I stopped there on my way home from a weekend visit with Mom. I saw so many species of birds that I've lost track. Among the highlights were a cinnamon teal--the first one I've seen, if I remember right (I don't keep lists)--a ringneck duck, many wood ducks and shovelers, a couple of greater yellowlegs, yellow-rumped warblers, and a dozen or so pintails, probably resting before the next leg of their flight up to the arctic. Best of all were fluffy mallard ducklings just learning to dabble, and a single gosling, carefully attended by its parents.

As I walked the usual 5.5 mile loop on the old dike road around the refuge, it struck me that I've been taking that trail routinely for 20 years now, usually alone, sometimes with various members of my family, sometimes with other birders I meet along the way. Each time, so many familiar sights and old memories appear: the bench along MacAllister Creek where I sat watching young eagles fledge...the hedges of wild roses out by the tide flats...the old duck blind where Dad, Mom, and I had a picnic of cheese sandwiches and tea on a long-ago November day...the bend of the Nisqually River where I often watch seals...the gnarled old big-leaf maple with its scarred and broken trunk...the slough where I saw a fox late one summer evening...the swampy spot where skunk cabbage comes up every year...the spot where R and I, still smelling of hospital, saw three owlets perched in a tree on the afternoon of the day Dad died...

On this particular evening, a breeze at my back blew me down the last leg of the trail, winding below high-arched maples and cedars. New green leaves fluttered and flashed in the late sun, swallows swooped, and warblers and sparrows darted and dashed through the trees. The constant motion of greenery and birds set up a sort of dizzying optical illusion, so that it began to seem as though not just leaves and birds but everything--the world itself--was gorgeously in motion, rolling down the path along with me, all of us come completely loose from our moorings, even time itself. And for a few minutes, it seemed almost as though all those long ago times I'd passed this way all rolled together into one single Now--the eagles, the owlets, Dad, Mom, R, the birders who've come and gone over the years, the trees that put forth their leaves and then drop them down again, year after year, the birds that come and go, and hatch and fledge, and then bear their own young in their own time--all of us were heading down the path back towards my car together.