Within These Misty Hills

A virgin explorer in a virgin wood, I walk strange paths that coil through the emerald, jade, and peridot sprouts of new forest rising from the wildfire’s weary ashes. They’re coated with the mist that descends in a chilled cloud, draped across the ancient summits of stone like a blanket draped on an old man who died in his favorite chair.

Tender tendrils of cloud and mist meet and kiss, and stroll across the lush new ground, using patches of fog like the kerchief dancers who undulate in sinuous, sensuous, serpentine motion before their night fires. They send coded promises of delight to their betrothed in the circle of elders, who smile as they remember their own wedding fires.

Then fire and blood, steel and rage, swept across the land in a raging conflagration, and everyone lost. It’s heat and savage purging holds no sway here, now.

These misty hills gave silent witness to the uproar, and biding their time, shielded a new offering of seed and soil to give the sun as the hills waited to receive me, and the mist surrounds me like curious children.

     Recognition of an ally? Wariness of an enemy?   

Seeing I mean no harm, the mist bids me welcome with a chaste damp kiss, and I feel the magic shift within me, my body suffused with pleasant heat against the chilly morning, and I don’t know whether to laugh or weep at my fanciful imagination.

I expect that in these misty hills, it doesn’t really matter.

The mist will do it with me.

 

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