from my Balcony essay
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One of my favorite places to go is the outdoor balcony in the back of my house. It is about ten to fifteen feet in the air, which means you look out from about fifteen to twenty feet in the air. Our house is snugly fit against a small woods. It’s only about twenty acres, but it’s enough so that you can’t see through. The reason that the balcony is so nice is that it looks out into the forest, giving you a view across a few feet of lawn and into the woods. One of the best scenes in the woods is when it’s covered in snow.
You could go out and look from the balcony out into the snowy woods. The brisk air would brush against your arm. You could hear the sound of water gurgling down the drain pipe behind you. The snowflakes felt cold as they landed on your skin and then melted into a tiny drop of water, which then blew away in the slightest breeze. The air had a fresh smell to it. Or rather the absence of an industrial smell, like that of gasoline or smog. The freshness made you want to take a deep breath and just stand there.
Looking out into the forest, almost nothing moved. The land and branches were blanketed in a soft white sheet of snow. A wooden playset sat in the snow with its two wooden towers, plastic slide, and swings hanging from the monkey bars that connected the two towers. It was all almost perfectly camouflaged in the snow. Here and there a patch of rich brown earth showed where the snow had melted. A rabbit, bird, or deer track lay almost invisible in the whiteness it was made in.
If you looked closely enough, You could see a robin resting at the base of a snowy branch. You could hear a woodpecker pecking away at a tall locust tree. Here and there a bird swooped down to pick up a berry, then find a warm nook in a tree to eat it in. Sometimes you could see a huge rabbit bigger than a house cat hidden in its white fur against the snow. If you were lucky, you could see a deer run into the distance, rattling its big horns against low twigs and branches, while flashing its white tail. Hundreds of feet in the air, a hawk would fly around. You could see in the snow far beneath your feet a small ridge that made twist and turns and sometimes crossed over itself. At the very end of the ridge a mouse slowly dug through the snow, finding food in the grass beneath. A groundhog hole might be concealed against a tree whose roots were visible poking through the snow. Despite how serene and still the forest was, it was filled with movement and life.
Though as hours passed, the snow would slowly melt as the midday sun beamed through. Little columns of steam would rise from where the sun hit strongly on a thick sheet of ice that was clinging to a tree. Birds would gather in the dozens or hundreds to peck at seeds now exposed to their hungry mouths. Over the days the blanket of snow would turn to a sheet, which would soon turn into water which drained down the sinkhole at the far side of the woods, carrying the water to someone’s well. One day they would leave the water out, and it would evaporate into a cloud, which slowly floated over the landscape, back to the forest it came from, where it would start to snow, beginning the endless cycle again. Returning the beautiful landscape that made you want to take a deep breath and just stand there.