A stinging sensation emanated from behind my nose and just below my eyes as I high-stepped through tall, dewy grass.
Above me hung the entire universe, as if the sky had been peeled back and the heavens directly exposed. Each star a brilliant stab of clean light interspersed with the deepest purples and blacks.
I had just descended from my treestand and began hiking out of the westernmost portion of a farm I deer hunt. This portion of the property remained untouched since the fall of 2016 when I last hunted it. Other parcels got more attention in 2017 and I just didn’t make time to hunt there. It was the close of my first evening back in two years.
On that first hunt back, two does tarried under my stand for a few minutes, their sleek hair fringing golden in the setting sunlight that evening.
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I didn’t shoot them, mostly because I didn’t want to. It was a quiet sit in a familiar place. I was glad to be finally back, though it wasn’t quite the same.
During the fall of 2016 my Dad was still alive.
He was always my first call out of the woods. It was our tradition. He was curious about what I saw, what the weather was like, and most importantly, if I shot something. If I put an arrow through a deer, I would call him first to tell him about the hit, then make a second call when I finally recovered the animal. We both knew that a deer isn’t yours until you’ve laid hands on it.
This walk out in 2018, just two years later, was silent. It didn’t hit me until I looked up at the night sky that the last time I gazed at those same stars, walking through this same grassy pasture, I was talking to my Dad. Same place, different time. The sting of tears forming caught me off guard and reaffirmed how helpless we are against the relentless march of time.
I sometimes feel like reality is simply the sum of time + place, and that I can control the place variable, but the time one slips by like water through fingers, constantly yielding a new “reality sum.” Some deep part of me still feels like if I just tried hard enough, I could figure out the time aspect and get those moments back. So far, in this life, it hasn’t happened.
Instead, I walked in silence, the only sounds those of crickets brave enough to defy the evening chill, knee-high grasses brushing over my pants, and each breath as it entered and exited my body. Life. Movement. Memory.
That night, there was no call out to make, but I did spend most of the hike back looking up.
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