It is entirely too hot.
Or, at Charlie would point out, I'm entirely too hot. "It," meaning the weather, is just fine, doing what it does in August.
My annual case of "lasts" has begun, my obsessive awareness of the approaching end of the school year. The beginning of the last semester, the end of the last summer, the last time I might see or do or experience this, that, or the other. There have been years when it was fairly mild, since I knew I'd be back the next year, it's just that I knew people who wouldn't be. The year I completed my novitiate it was very intense, as I knew I'd be entering Absence, three whole years away.
This year it's again different. I'm not going anywhere--I probably won't be living on campus next year, but I intend to remain fully involved as an ally. I won't really ever have to leave. And yet I won't be a student anymore.
I don't know why this bothers me so much. I've been gradually ceasing to be a student for a long time, now. I know novices mostly because I've had them as students, not as classmates. Most of my friends around here are masters or candidates. It's not like I want to be a student here forever, I'd get bored. And yet.
I watched Hawk flying her hawk the other day. I almost wrote "flying with her hawk," but that's what it looked like. Woman and bird seemed equally un-self-conscious, equally focused, and perfectly coordinated, as though they were a single organism and each could go where the other was. It wasn't then quite so hot as it is today, and the sky was a hard, pale blue with streaky clouds across it. Hawk stood at the Edge of the World and launched the bird, not at a specific prey animal--the normal thing in falconry, I understand, as falconers don't want their birds flying free without anything particular to do, lest they fly off--but there were birds in the canopy of the Enchanted Forest, and mice and rabbits and ground hogs in the pasture, especially near the cover of the apple orchard. The bird circled for a bit then dove at something I couldn't see, broke off the attack, and lit in a tree.
Hawk watched the hawk in the tree for a minute or two, then jogged towards the apple orchard and along its edge, through the tall grass where the goats and sheep haven't been yet this year.
Suddenly, a rabbit flushed out of the grass and ran out across the cropped pasture at the base of the Edge and the hawk dove but missed the rabbit by a hair (no pun intended) and the animal dove into a clump of goldenrod and hid. The hawk circled around and returned to the tree, but by that time crows had noticed the situation and began mobbing, calling more and more crows in. The hawk hunched its shoulders, seeming vaguely bothered. Hawk called out, offering a piece of meat, and the hawk flew to her glove. Woman and bird together left the scene, heading for the farm fields and the shed where Charlie butchers deer in the fall.
Neither of them had seen me watching the whole time. I was invisible.
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