On the Peach Blossom Spring

"Every evening, after the merchant had left, Rendi crept from the stifling, sticky cart into the fresh night air and peeked up. And every time, the Starry River of the Sky was empty."
  – Grace Lin, from Starry River of the Sky









2.

It had gone on much like this for Saul for several years – as the other young men and women from his school had gone on their own adventures, pursued the sports of the seasons, and crammed into large cars for road trips to each others houses, Saul would dutifully wake up early in the morning on the weekends, pack in bag with all of the essential that he might need on his journey, set a course and then leave for the day, telling his mother that was most certainly no alone on this adventures. It was on this particular morning in middle spring that he became quite surprised by where he finally found his place for the future, as he had been calling it for two years to himself now. The morning had begun a slate gray, without much prospect, but as the sun rose the sky quickly became the kind of blaze that feels immediately enlightening and most importantly inviting to the walker of trails. He wanted to catch a view of the valley so walked down a well known road into the mammoth suburbs of the city, where, along the sidewalks, children on bikes had also felt the great promise of warmth. The last of the snow piles had turned to pools of water across the surface of the green and rolling golf course. Two men even stood at the tee box of the first hole eyeing up distances for the first time of the season. Saul knew of a hidden trailhead at the top of one of the last vacant lots left in this rolling, hilly suburb and began to walk up it, taking a stick for stability on the uneven ground. It was the dark side of the valley so that the trail itself, at least along its way upward, was quite dark and cavernous, an old farm trail that was no doubt used for a hundred or more years before it had sold off. An old and haggard fence lined the way to one side and a steep and sometimes rocky bluff side lined the other. He began to see through the eyes of the farmer, who no doubt used this very trail for cattle passing or a tractor to seek a better view of the land. It rose up to a top that blazed nearly orange by the exposed sandstone where a prairie led upwards through an outcropping of laid rock and back behind that a birch stand and finally what Saul knew to be an oak savannah, never touched, never grazed, wild, bright, open, a landscape not often seen or admired. He sat up on the highest manageable rock and looked down onto the valley, now awash by sunlight, and even though the large geometric homes lined every side street and cul de sac, it was the old geometry of the farm fields that he could see. The green of it had become stronger than the color of the roofs and it came to him, as he scanned back and forward, and all around, that this would be his new project for the future...