Just beyond the dock sits a barely visible metal post resembling that of a former street sign. It is hard to conceptualize that this place I love so dearly was conceived from a natural catastrophe long before I entered the world. The sun sets out in front of me. After a long day of enjoying family time, leisurely reading, or swimming—more accurately avoiding stinging nettles—I sit on this dock and think about this special moment of time. It is the most beautiful time of day—when the sun is dipping down to recharge its battery for the next day. Here, the serenity and comfort that comes full circle in my life, at last, exists.

As Aldo Leopold writes in his A Sand County Almanac “Marshland Elegy”, “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language” (Leopold, 96). Although I have attempted to use two adjectives to capture this moment, language—in its functioning qualities in our world—cannot encapsulate what this moment means to my senses. As a young child, I would retreat with our family to our cottage in Deltaville, Virginia—affectionately referred to as “The Rivah” by many—and notice this moment, but not the way I notice it now. I see much more now. I think about my life when I see this sunset now. I think about what I have been through, what I am doing, and what I want to be. It isn’t always a reflection of joy. At times, I reflect on mistakes and misfortunes that I could have handled differently.

But what makes this moment truly special for me isn’t the sight in front of me. It doesn’t come from the aroma of brackish water in a Virginia tributary. The special sensory feeling that results from this moment lies in my ability to simply reflect in a manner of true examination. I have yet to find another moment in life when I can consistently reflect. Leopold later writes in “The Sand Counties”, “Within the ample reaches of the Sand Counties these economic terms of reproach find beneficial exercise, free pasturage, and immunity from the gadflies of critical rebuttal” (Leopold, 102)—“The Rivah” gives me this opportunity to exercise, if necessary, self-reproach and true examining of where I stand in life. It permits me to examine the entire person that I am—to think favorably upon the moments of comparable quality to this beautiful sunset, and to critique the decisions I’ve made that are not such.

Works Cited

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac And Sketches Here and There. New York, NY, Oxford    University Press, 1949. Introduction by Robert Finch. 1987