On a Sunday morning at the cabin where I winter, a delicate clunking of deer hoof against rock stirs me out of easy dreaming. When I go from window to window looking outside for spindly legs, I blink the night out of my eyes and see nothing but light caught in bird wings. Below the front porch new marks in the dirt look as delicate as elf footprints. A rabbit bounces down the driveway and a moment later two rabbits come back up. I wish they’d bring me my first cup of tea. A blue jay at the bird feeder squawks, “In your dreams!”
It will be weeks before I lose the mystery I gain from four months on fire lookout: a feeling through my bones that we are all in gentle conversation, birds, flowers, clouds, rocks, trees and me. Sunflowers still sing to me. They are cheap in grocery stores these days so I put five stems on my kitchen table to have company with breakfast. They have the same smug rotund smiles as the wild ones fading on hillsides in the woods. The ones outside launch long bass notes over the landscape, I think, while the four in the pitcher on the wood table are mezzo sopranos casting a web of easy hum inside my cabin like Tatiana Troyanos at the Met as Octavian, with a fifth flower that is a soprano adding a trickle of descant melody.
I am walking daily to get my head out of the clouds. If you haven’t been outdoors to savor September you are missing a wonderful opportunity to top off your batteries ahead of winter. Now is the time to put a deposit in your beauty bank to get you through gray and cold, short days and shoveling. Scraping is coming. But now you can walk through tall grasses where hundreds of caterpillars move their lumpy bodies through transformation as if it is the only job on earth: changing each hour from finger-length bird food to butterfly before freezing nights. Mountains of clouds still paint shapes against startling blue. 
Cumulus reflections in a stock pond seem to ask for a massage so I chunk a rock onto the glassy surface and watch ripples slowly stroke curves. I call it “planet Rolfing.”
But that was yesterday. Today by my front door I choose the blue chair for my first cup of tea and rest a book on the yellow chair. In the distance I see the Peaks fogged with moisture; there is Kendrick Mountain in the clear; the sturdy back of Mingus Mountain looks like it might arch and stretch any moment. Do I imagine the chickadees fall quiet when I read aloud from Thoreau’s WALDEN? He wrote, “I had three chairs in my house, one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” I do have a chair for solitude: the oak rocker by the bookshelves inside. And I have two chairs on my porch with Henry as friend today. It is too soon for society. To enter into the foam of multiple voices is surfing that feels too confusing to me now. It will be awhile until my town head returns.
Or perhaps I am prematurely morphing into an old coot, too content to talk to rabbits, murmur at squirrels, and argue with the occasional rat that insists on chewing wiring. Maybe my coffeehouse-loving nature has gone missing. But I do have a third red chair I can add to the mix here, “for society.” And I got a deal on a big second-hand Weber grill at Full Circle last week; I could kiss salmon with mesquite coals and make zucchini sizzle, throw a party with the next full moon.
“Ha ha. The biggest introvert in the woods wants to throw a party?” chuckles a pine tree.
A passing vulture tips its wings to comment, “What? Will you send out invitations on the backs of falling aspen leaves? Hope no one shows up?”
“She’ll forget to give directions,” a hummingbird concludes.
Many of us have gotten off river trips and felt the puzzle of how to return to boat-less community. Made rich for days by giving in to going downstream, it becomes hard to imagine thriving elsewhere. Change your experience of ten days on the river to three or fourth months on a peak top and imagine how a lookout season might rearrange your sense of people. You’d think decades of experience would make re-entries graceful eventually. Well sometimes yes and sometimes no; like most humans I remember how to be wise then I forget. For now, there are two chairs on the porch by the round wooden hex my sister painted to put on the cabin for good luck. Good luck is company enough for now.
