Last Sunday afternoon, my oldest daughter and I took a walk on the
Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath.
The weather was perfect: warm enough to be comfortable in a sweater; cool enough to know it was autumn.
The gold and brown and orange foliage formed a colorful tunnel over the towpath. Wind and rain had not cleared the branches though there were enough scattered on the path to create the "swoosh, swoosh, swoosh" while walking on the fallen leaves, one of the loveliest sounds in God's creation.
It was just the two of us. She's eight. I know there are days when I work late that I arrive home and can tell the difference in her height. She is growing too fast and it sometimes seems like yesterday that I cut her cord and held her damp and pink and passed her to my wife to hold for the first time.
We walked mostly without speaking, a comfortable, companionable silence.
The towpath is a long, flat stretch of small gravel built up high for the canal boats to be pulled alongside. The path on the other side of the Potomac River from Shepherdstown, W.Va., runs through a thickly wooded stretch.
The canal is nearly empty of water and instead filled with trees, some too thick to reach arms around. The river is a stone's toss away. A country road runs not too far on the other side and the only sound other than the natural we could hear was the occasional motorcyclist out on a scenic ride. Their roars quickly faded.
On the other side of the road visible through the trees are old farm fields, a light brown with the remnants of harvested soybean and corn stalks.
We walked down a side path to the river's edge where long ago soldiers from Pennsylvania had crossed the ford in pursuit of General Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army. Many soldiers died and there is a marker to them.
The river shimmered and sparkled over the rocks below. We spoke for a time, nothing important, just the sort of things a father and daughter talk about: the silliness of the middle child, the way the baby - now almost two - looks up to the oldest.
We walked back and ate an apple and drank our water.
A breeze blew and hundreds of leaves fell lazily before us and on top of us.
And I experienced one of those moments in life where I know with as much certainty as I know anything that people in heaven were gazing down upon us with envy and joy.
And I thought as I finished the apple about big thoughts. I thought of my daughter and her life stretching farther than the long path before us. In the early spring of her life. And I thought of my life and since I fathered children later than my friends how I am in the late summer of my life.
And with my beautiful daughters and wife beside me, the autumn of my life might be my best season and one to look forward to most of all.