Everyday Magic

Back in the early summer, my husband and I went for a hike at the state forest near our house. We’ve been there many times, during every season, and know the woodland pretty well. Along our regular route, there’s a side trail that leads to a ledge overlooking a pond. We don’t always visit the ledge, but this day we did. The first thing I noticed was a pile of what looked like white balloon skins. After looking more closely, I discovered a few more piles, all of them beside shallow holes dug into the sandy soil. Then it dawned on me: turtles! We had come across a nursery where mother turtles had laid their eggs in the spring. The baby turtles had recently hatched, leaving their egg casings behind.

It was amazing to me that we’d been to that exact spot so many times and had never noticed how alive it was.

Magic is everywhere if you’re open to seeing it. Sometimes it’s in the way the sun reflects off our birdbath, creating a dancing globe of light on the tree behind it. It’s in the miniature green bees that visit my garden, the pollinating insects almost too small for me to see without my glasses. There’s magic in a toddler’s smile, and in the look of delight on their face when you smile back.

A couple of weeks before we discovered the turtle hatchery, we were at the same state forest by the same pond, but in a different spot. My husband pointed to an oak limb stretching out over the water. “Look at that bird,” he said. “It’s huge.” An adult barred owl was perched on the branch, its eyes trained on the pond. As we stood and watched, the owl swooped down and grabbed something just below the surface with its talons and flew up into the canopy, never making a sound.

Just yesterday, Rob and I were on the porch at Mount Holyoke’s Summit House, a 19th century hotel in Hadley, Massachusetts, that is today a museum and visitors center. Looking down at a flower bed below where we were standing, I spotted a tiny iridescent green bird bouncing from blossom to blossom. The hummingbird made several trips to the flowers, stopping occasionally to rest on top of a nearby fence. Several people walked right past the little jewel, most of them much closer to the bird than I was, but they were all too preoccupied to notice him. On the hummer’s final trip between the flowerbed and the fence, he flew up to the spot where I was standing and landed briefly on the railing beside me. It was as if he knew I’d been watching him.

If you’re quiet and pay close attention to your surroundings, there’s almost no limit to the magical things you can find. I used to think I needed to travel the world to find inspiring, wonderful things to help mitigate life’s hardships and disappointments, and help me come up with ideas for my writing, but that’s not the case at all. Everything I need is wherever I happen to be.

ENP