Everyday Canvas

Nature’s Wonders

Prompt: Tell us about the most amazing place in nature that you’ve been to. What made it so amazing for you?

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Although I am the one who came up with this prompt, I am having a very difficult time pinpointing a place. To begin with, I love the ocean and the beach the most, then the snow-topped mountains and the waterfalls. Yet, what keeps coming up in my memory is the New England forests in autumn, mainly those in New Hampshire because that is where we went once and their vivid impressions always stayed with me.

It was before I developed all my allergies, the worst of them attacking me with ragweed spores. I am guessing this was about forty-five to fifty years ago when we went on a road trip from Long Island to Massachusetts in early October.

We stopped in Concord for three nights and visited a forest (Cilley State Forest?) which had a few trails. If I remember correctly, the forest was named after a general in the Revolution. We went on two of those trails for very short walks but the beauty of the place will stay with me forever. I think it was the colors and the topographical variety by which I mean hills and valleys and boulders and flat areas. The colors were just turning on the tall trees with bright reds against yellows, oranges, and hints of green. There was something divine and peaceful about the place with the colors lighting up the dense shadowy parts of the forest.

I am not sure if the two brooks that impressed me were here or in some other forest or park we visited on our way north, but one of the brooks flowed over a terrain of several levels made up of boulders. The other had lots of smaller rocks and pebbles but its bed was flat. Both these tiny bodies of flowing water were framed by colorful trees and brush. Those sights, too, have stayed in my memory.