Spring came late that year, as it so often does. Grey light dampened its approach and the first day of sun brought a stunning revelation: a hazy wash of green had been laid over the branches of the town's black willows. Suddenly, everything greened, including my spirit. I had been trapped all winter in a college dorm, drawing comfort from my father's letters in which he misquoted T. S. Eliot: "April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of despair," he wrote. Reading those words renewed my hope. Mornings of fighting my way across the cemetery to get to campus, against a bitter canyon wind that spit snow crystals like buckshot into my foolishly bare legs, were almost over.

The earth warmed and stretched toward the sun, and I with it. Those longer days brought memories of childhood:

Hours spent in the small woods behind my house, peeling chunks of bark off pine trees, to rub over my nose, eyes closed, floating away on their heady vanilla smell.

Afternoons of watching thunderheads form over the mountains west of our house; they built so fast there was almost no time to catch the dog changing into a dragon. I braced while the rain fell for a wild 15 minutes, with timpani thunder and strobe lightning, dumping a gullywasher and ending as abruptly as it began.

Mornings with my face buried in the garden border of dwarf marigolds, fernlike leaves making the perfect house for fairies, or at least a refuge for a captured horned toad.

Those were secure years, bound up with family love and the rhythms of northern New Mexico land, and the life it nourished. Now, sprung from that coccoon and living on adopted terrain, I struggled for purchase in a new relationship. I needed to be in love. I wanted to love without question, and be loved that way in return.

That's where I thought I was on a bright May day: in love, and at large in Blacksmith Fork Canyon. Carefree, ambling east up the middle of the dirt road, puffs of dust marking the path where our feet fell. Grasshoppers jetted from blade to blade in the grass alongside the road. Butterflies and pale green moths danced their spacey way over open patches of wildflowers that dotted the canyon meadows. The stream that rushed through the canyon bottom ran full, a musical background to the morning.

I was in love with love and utterly rhapsodic. Naturally I thought I was in love with a person, a special one who was along with me to share this day. He, though, was abroad with a more directed purpose than basking in spring's glory: my love was putting together an insect collection for his entomology class, and he was running late. Armed with net and killing jar he stalked through the unsuspecting bug world. I was his aide-de-camp, searching out havens of winged creatures for him to immobilize on pins in a cardboard box.

As the idyllic morning moved toward noon, the air grew more languid and the novelty of the bug-hunting game wore thin. Distracted, I wandered toward a grove of aspen and maple, thinking to find a spot of shade where no bugs buzzed.

Suddenly I found myself occupying a moment in time that breached all the physical and emotional barriers we humans carry with us.

I was within a perfect, secluded hollow about six feet square, no larger, surrounded by walls of sapling aspen and tall grass, within a grove of larger, rougher evergreens that met overhead like a ceiling. Sunlight filtered through the lacy green open places, just enough to illuminate the moss-covered bark of a fallen log that lay diagonally across the small green room. A brooklet from the main stream trickled along one side.

Time stopped. I barely breathed, I was so enchanted by the perfection of Earth's artistry and the hallowedness of this spot. I sank silently to sit next to the log and thought to do no more than absorb every precious moment of being part of this place and making it part of me.

Then -- discovery. My bug hunter blundered in. He stepped into the tiny creek, leaving a quagmire of muddy holes where his feet sunk in.. Where had I been? he demanded.

Instantly I wanted him out of my place. Something like fear prickled the hairs on my neck. He didn't belong here, didn't understand this; it was hopeless to try to explain what magic transfixed me. All this truth came home to me in an instant of pure knowledge, without judgment. I simply knew I had to get him out of there before something irrevocable happened.

Come on, I said, urging him back into the light of the open meadow. Let's finish your bugs. Too late I saw him turn back to my sacred green glen. I saw his arm flash down to the fallen log.

I saw it then in slow motion. I see it now a generation later in freeze frames. Pieces of my life's puzzle stitch themselves together like a quilt, to explain a mismatch that ended in divorce, a relationship that was ever out of synch. I saw his arm flash down to the mossy log, his hand wrench it up from its resting place beneath the trees where time had saved it for maybe a hundred years, until I had been picked from among numberless human beings to behold its Being for the first time. The first time ever. And now the last.

He threw it down in disgust, a heap of rotted splinters. There were no bugs living in or underneath it, at least none he didn't already have pinned. My place had nothing to offer him and in an eyeblink, he destroyed it. He had desecrated the gift, stripped the magic, ravaged the moment, and gutted me with it. Though I did not know it then, I was a casualty.

It happend 30 years ago. Still, whenever I try to talk about that Day, I find myself skating around the core of it. The truth of it lies too close to the bone: that moment in time is central to what was flawed in our relationship. Perhaps it was the most real reason for our parting.

Copyright © 1998, Nancy Matlack Williams

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Copyright © 2001 by The Bridge Review: Merrimack Valley Culture and University of Massachusetts Lowell. All Rights Reserved for compilation. Rights revert to individual contributors following publication. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher and individual contributor.