Anemoia

During COVID, the place I lived was shut down. Before COVID, it was a busy, tourist loved place. It was the kind of place in which you never really found any solace, unless you were in your house, and even then, a tourist might wander into your yard and snap a photo of your quaint little lodgings because, anemoia, which the Internet tells me is the feeling of nostalgia for a time you never experienced.

So when they shut my little town down, and all the tourists were locked in their houses DoorDashing groceries and discovering sourdough, the land I lived on came back to life.

I had lived there for five winters and seven summers at that point, and I knew what the change in seasons brought. I knew which roads would be impassible due to gridlock in the summer, where the morels would sprout in the spring, which streams would turn to frazzle ice on the rarest of winters, which meadows were the best to lie in on a long autumn day.

And when COVID shut the world down, the spring of 2020 turned my little world into an uncharted wild territory. Places that I had never seen without throngs of people were suddenly empty, showing me views I had never seen. But really what was startling was the way the wildlife came out from the shadows.

I saw more bears that spring than I had ever seen. Hungry ravens colonized my roof, threatening to steel anything we ate off our picnic table (they were hungry without the hordes of picnicking tourists feeding them a steady diet of hot dogs and Cheetos), and on a fateful day, I went running with a deer.

I was on a jog, looping through the sidewalks and bridges that were normally clotted with people, no one but me in a meadow people traveled from around the world to photograph. I cut over a bridge which usually required me to slalom through wandering visitors, and I turned onto the sidewalk which led East.

I ran on the sidewalk for a while, and then realized, no one was in the two lane road. Usually this was jammed with cars, and on summer weekends, it could be hours of stand still traffic to get through this section of road. But that day, it was just me out there.

So, I left the sidewalk and hit the blacktop. I ran on the dotted centerline, my feet echoing below me. Never had I been on that road on foot without cars surrounding me, and now, it was mine. All mine.

Until, from the meadow beside me, a deer appeared. She popped out of the meadow, and saw me. I stared at her, not slowing my pace, thinking she would wait until I passed her to cross the road.

But instead, she began to parallel me. We ran, next to each other, her on the empty sidewalk, me in the empty road. I lengthened my stride; she kept up easily. No one else existed in the world. I could see her muscles moving under her skin. She watched me, but not warily, rather, with curiosity. I had seen countless deer in this place, over my years, and I'd even been charged by one on another run.

I'd cut around a corner and startled a buck. He was in a field crammed with people, and it was obvious he just wanted to be alone. But this deer now, the one running through the wide-open, human-made paths with me, she was relaxed. She wasn't looking for an exit. She wasn't trying to make space from me. She wasn't preparing to fight me. She was playful. She was running with me because, why not? I couldn't help but smile so wide, my face ached with it.

We ran until the road turned. I kept going forward, and she cut into the trees. The rest of my run was uneventful, but those brief moments of looking into her black eye, falling into glorious step next to her, feeling young, powerful, and free, my body strong, the wind dancing on my bare arms, they were everything.

It makes me wonder what this world was like before we laid down roads and put up buildings. Not that I'm harkening for a time without running water and women's health experts. But still, it makes you wonder what wonders people a thousand years ago saw, and in this modern age, we could never imagine.