One spring afternoon my boy saw a whole field of crimson clover for the first time and he stopped, not the polite kind of stop you do when someone tells you to look at something, but the bone-deep, knee-bent, eyes-wide stop of a boy who has just stumbled into a kind of magic he didn’t know was possible, and the wind was brushing its fingers through the red ocean like a mother smoothing a child’s hair, and he whispered “whoa, Papa,” without knowing he had said it, and the whoa wasn’t for me, or for the field, but for the fact that he was alive in a world where such a thing could exist.
and then later that day we moved the herd, seventy or eighty sheep, a woolly tide rolling from one pasture to the next, and he laughed at the way they bunched and surged and split and joined again, how the just-born-months-ago lambs pressed in tight to their mothers as if the air was full of wolves, how Winnie watched with a bit of alertness, a lot of excitement for her at this age, and I could see him sewing it into the loom of memory, tying knots so it wouldn’t slip loose, already imagining the day he would say to someone I once saw a hundred sheep run like the sea.
and in the late afternoon he would take off for the spring, still above ground this time of year, and perfect for tromping, stomping and splashing and laughing, until his pants clung to his knees, chasing Winnie, who was always just far enough ahead to keep the game alive, following deer trails into the oak and cherry and fir tangles, and he would stop sometimes, hands on his knees, gasping like the air itself was a gift he had to gulp before it vanished.
and along the way he found rocks the way some men find God, a smooth one in the paddock, a speckled, mottled, ancient, volcanic rock with ribbons of yellow, brown, red, orange and black, the same look of excitement as when he’d find a shard of jasper or agate on the beach glowing like captured fire, and he would hold them up to the light, weigh them in his palm, smile to himself as if he had learned their secret names.
and the agates and quartz and drift-polished wonders would ride home in his pockets, clinking softly, as if trying to remind him they were still there, a private choir singing just for him, and sometimes I think those pockets and his heart are the same thing, both burgeoning with treasures we may not see until he decides to show you.
and here is what I know: on those days when I walk beside him, I feel like I am the boy and he is the one leading me, on these days, he is the teacher, the priest in the cathedral of clover and spring and shore, the keeper of the small and holy things, the shepherd of my seeing. He is the one who remembers how to see and how to love and how to live. He remembers how to look at the world as if seeing it were reason enough to love it.