Yesterday late afternoon we were coming home through the harbor, up the ocean road to Kohala. There’s a handful of metal commercial buildings right after that turn.
It was there that something caught my eye—a flock of geese, flying in V formation toward the mountain.
Geese.
A flock of them.
In Hawaiʻi.
We have the nēnē goose, but I have never seen them fly. I have only seen them in the grasses, on the ground, up Mana Road on the backside of Maunakea.
Three years ago we were living on a small ranch in northern New Mexico at the end of a long winding road, nestled into the national forest.
We had spent weeks with chainsaws and small axes, limbing and clearing the forest that was part of our fenced acreage.
We constructed clear trails, and it was a pleasure walking through that wooded grove morning and night with the dogs in tow.
We never leashed them. There was no need. But I always carried a leash in my pocket.
Then there was that morning when Peanut began to growl, his hackles standing fully erect, nose down, tracking something in a zigzag pattern.
I snapped the leash on just in time to spot a mountain lion strolling along the back fence line.
I regarded her with awe.
She regarded me with piercing eyes and a general sense of indifference.
She knew that land better than I would ever begin to know it.
Before I could bask in her beauty any longer, she gazed back at me over her left shoulder, swished her black-tipped tail, and padded silently away.
I have never learned how to summon wonder.
Only how to recognize it when it interrupts an otherwise ordinary day.