vaneramos | Spinning words into gold

This morning the breeze, gently and blessedly cool, yearns toward September. Many people amble up and down the wooded path adjacent to the Eramosa River, walking their dogs. Today, everyone smiles and says hello. A griffin passes me silently.

"He's a little aloof with strangers," his owner says, and calls the dog back to greet me.

"He's very nice," I say earnestly.

Around the grassy point where my daughters often find tadpoles, a new generation of leopard frogs rustles invisibly under cover of arched blades.

An elderly man wanders in search of a large snapping turtle he saw the other day. Spying my camera, he starts complaining about one he bought at a garage sale yesterday.

"It won't wind the film," he says. "I bought a roll but it doesn't work. It's a Vivitar. It flashes and everything but the film won't wind. Guess that's what I should expect from paying two dollars for a camera."

I nod in response and squat near a log to take a picture of a clump of arrowhead bursting beside the riverbank. The arrowhead and the clear blue of the sky today remind me of Lake Fletcher. I have been eyeing the same plant all week, wanting an image of its elegant leaves extending like grateful hands to the sun over the river, this river I have come to love so much, simply because it is here, keeping me company, opening my eyes. This morning the light is perfect for a picture, glowing fondly on the leaves, turning the reflected sky into heaven.

At one point along the path I have to lift my bare arms safely above my head to push past nettles, their gaunt stems lounging across the path. They brush past my shirt.

"I see you're acquainted with nettles," says someone coming up behind me. It's turtle-camera man.

The riverbank is infested with slim, scruffy men in ball caps fishing. But one fisherman is particularly handsome, neither scruffy nor skinny. I abandon the path searching futilely for a vantage from which to photograph him.

The wildflowers are too tall: goldenrod and joe-pye weed, and a big wild elderberry bush with clusters slowly ripening to purple in the August sun. Bright thickets of jewelweed hum with bees. Their thick, watery stems crunch succulently underfoot. Wild cucumber vines drape themselves everywhere and lace it all in white.

I don't know what to do with all this happiness. Somehow the beauty spinning in my mind has to turn into gold I can put in the bank. I need to meet Rumplestiltskin wandering along the river and strike a deal with him. Maybe that was him, with the broken camera. Then like the princess in the fairytale, I'll live happily and wealthily ever after. Of course she had to cheat him in the end, but that's okay because she was sweet and pretty, and he was a nasty, greedy little man.

I can do sweet and pretty. Unfortunately those virtues never fare as well in Oscar Wilde's fairytales as they do in the Brothers Grimm or Hans Chrstian Anderson. Dear old Oscar didn't necessarily believe in happy endings for the suffering artist, but he did believe that art redeemed society. I'll just have to write my own story, in which the poet with the silver pen always turns around to find the jewelweed and goldenrod have banded together to pay his rent and put food on the table.

On a morning like this I can almost believe magic is alive in the world, waiting around every turn in the path.