Mitchell's Landing

This is one of many places in the marsh where man has been and gone, leaving a leaning post, a splintered bamboo pole, a broken bucket, a sagging plank that crossed the slough. Here is where he sat and watched the minnows dart from one reed jungle to the next, where lumbering blue herons flapped a yard above his head, where he paused within the limp-rag flopping sound of wavelets lapping on the shore to listen to the tick-tick-tick of his own consciousness.