river

Shelley (named after the English poet), who had been with me before three years ago in the salt marsh, and her friend Cheryl, down from the outskirts of D.C., braved the gusty cold winds of late April and made their way with me on a two-hour river tour. We had *just* enough water in the rice canal, although had to use our paddles as push poles at one point over the mud hump. (I had made the booking time while looking at the salt marsh tides, apparently.)
 
We passed the blue irises in bloom, up White Creek where one little gator sunk under and two prothonotary warblers—the first I’d seen this spring—flittered about. We rounded the corner to the big river, and the wind kicked up, and big yachts threw medium-sized wakes, then eddied in the river lilies beneath the heron rookery, and crossed to the other side as ospreys circled overhead. 
 
Shelley and Cheryl were readers—we all three shared a love of the Knoxville novelist and poet James Agee—and today they were river readers—the best kind, which is to say, kind and interested and interesting. And the sky was a cloudless deep blue, and the leaves on the trees were springing in fresh green.