Well, hello. I'm back. Did you miss me? You don't actually have to answer. I had a really wonderful time at my cottage, again, and it reminds me that I am, despite financial and employment-related appearances, a very lucky woman. Everyone should have that special place where they can feel utterly at home, real, at peace, whatever. I have that in my cottage. I an hour or so before bed, one night, writing down the things that affected me, and now I will retype them here, with little editing. Bear in mind that these musings were written in scratchy hand in the hour of witches in the middle of the forest, by a small lake, in western Quebec.

I had a classic "cottage" night, tonight. A series of small, but poignant events that bear repeating. After a day of rain, constant and soaking, the sky cleared at sunset, as it so often does, and remains clear to this late hour, despite radio proclamations to the contrary: "Thunderstorms, possibly heavy at times." Shortly after the sun had gone down, I turned off the radio to read while enjoying the dusk noises and other audible treats. My soundtrack was the awesome amphibious chorus with the other chairs of the orchestra filled by whip-poor-wills, eerie night birds, moths bouncing off the window screens, all to a faint backdrop of far-away traffic and the occasional barking of dogs in the distance. How many miles distant, I cannot know.

Several chapters later, the whip-poor-wills had gone silent (though some nights they call until dawn) and I found that it was about time for that last stroll up the hill (code for 'outhouse') to attend to the demands of the body. Stepping outside, flashlight in hand, I checked the sky and was very pleased to see Arcturus, my favourite star in the heavens. It was the first star I ever identified, other than Polaris (the easy one). When I finished up the hill, I wandered onto the deck and watched the sky. The deck, suffering from the camp's lights, is really not the best place to star-gaze. The Big Rock, overlooking the lake, is the best place, but not up for the forest path at midnight, the next best place and perennial favourite is the bridge. Perhaps I should write it as, The Bridge, as it's really spoken with an uppercase.

Not that long ago, I was afraid to stand on The Bridge in the middle of the night without my mother by my side. With the onset of certain maturity, however; that strange fear has gone, sadly along with some of the better joys of childhood, too, it seems. Out on The Bridge, through the opening in the forest canopy and above the lake, a substantial portion of the sky is visible. The stars were shining brightly in their multitude, second only to the brightness of those brutally cold nights we can have up there.

All of a sudden, I was awash in memories of the sort that you welcome when they visit, but they don't visit all that often. The first were of two cats I grew up with. Bold, graceful Misha, passing our ankles with a rub and his long tail in the air heading down the planks, out into the dark forest to hunt. Then, fat and happy Placi trotting down the path onto The Bridge, tail quivering with excitement as Mom and I greet his arrival. I found myself, at this point, looking up onto the path to see if he was there. I wasn't looking for Willi though she is prone to follow me, no, I was looking specifically for a cat that for something like fourteen out of seventeen years came down that very path every night we went star-gazing.

At this point, I turned back to the stars that have always filled me with wonder, moreso up there than anywhere else. The Milky Way was laid out across the sky above and behind me like sparkling dust. I reoriented my view to look out above the water and not even a full five seconds later, a beautiful shooting star passed right through the Big Dipper. Sometimes it's nicer to think of them as shooting stars rather than meteors. I smiled, recalling those days of perfection in my earliest childhood when I would be standing in that very spot and never see the shooting stars. "Oh, there ! Did you see that one?!" I would mumble an answer, mostly 'no' but sometimes 'yes' just to bolster myself in a moment that reall was meant for my parents. They would stand there together, gloriously together, arms wrapped around each other, peering up into the heavens, my pop explaining the constelations to my mother. How a born-and-bred Brooklyn Jew new about skies invisible in New York, I will never know. I would be there at their hip, looking up at the sky and also at them, my parents, so much bigger than me, and, for that moment brief as it might be, perfectly in love with each other. To a four-year-old Maya, the world in those moments was as it should be.

A satelite zigged across the sky and that moment recalled was gone. There are nights, special, magical nights when sound is carried on the wind and things can be heard that, like the distant barking of dogs, normally would not reach us in our camp. Some years it has been loons calling from larger lakes higher up, sometimes the howls of wolves. On these nights other sounds ring much fuller and echo across the water, distorting any sense of direction. First it was far away, a whisper barely audible over the croaking of the frogs: a train. The train !! My excitement over trains, and especially the ones that run below the mountain at my cottage, will never die so long as their whistles and rumbles can still be heard. For a number of years, the trains didn't run on the Quebec side of the river anymore and when we heard them they were only shadow-trains, much further away across the wide waters of the Ottawa in Ontario. Only a few years ago did they begin to run again and I confirmed that they do still, at least twice a day.

Walking back from The Bridge to my cottage, the train's whistle began to intensify: Long, long, short. Pause. Now louder: Long, loooooong... I have a friend who's father is a great train enthusiast and by osmosis, she's learned the meanings of the various whistle patterns. I must ask her about these. I've heard them nearly all my life. Probably, they mean something like, "crossing" and "bridge" or something mundane like that. Sort of like yodelling the price of sheep over the mountains. Standing now on the deck once more, the train sounds like it is going to rush out of the forest and blast straight through me. The echo reverberates and I swear I can feel the track rumbling beneath my feet. What an intense rush of feeling.

What a truly wonderful night.