The sun retreats, the ice creeps; of lakes and memories

A walk today around Decker Lake.

Actually, a couple circuits on an unseasonable cold (20 degrees) morning.

My fancy hearing aids allow audio streaming from my iPhone 7-plus, so I put on the Eikona recording of Orthodox Christian prayers and walked for the next hour.

Reminders of generations, petitioning the Divine
for forgiveness, mercy, understanding, and acceptance of weakness, made strong by faith and actions . . . however weak and seemingly ineffective.

Only two other people were on the pathway around the lake. To the East, the Wasatch Mountains towered, the first snow caps of autumn clear on a crisp, cold late-morning.

Ducks had waddled into the water further from shore, skidding across think sheet of translucent ice into the still-open waters.

Overhead, a vanguard of Canadian geese circled over the lake, seemingly discouraged by the encroaching bank ice, and flew further to the northwest. Seconds later, some 30 more geese, locked in triangular formations, followed their lead.

The skies were clear, a canopy of powder blue, and the sun, mockingly, shone bright but offered little warmth. A  breeze underscored the changing of seasons, so rapidly from autumn to the first chill breath of winter.

The brown leaves, just a month ago so vibrant and green, then for a glorious couple weeks golden and orange, lay at my feet -- brown, decaying and disintegrating.

It all reminded me of my parents. My father died in January, my mother passed in June.

I imagined the snow covering their graves in Eastern Washington, where it is colder, grayer, bleaker as brief autumn gives way to the arctic winds with a sigh this time of year.

As I listened to the prayers of the Ancient Faith, chanted over the millennia by the believing hopeful, I thought of Mom and Dad. Memories flowed,; and I tasted those still-warm recollections, resolute in my hope of safeguarding who they were.

And now, I am the earthly receptacle of those memories, so few, so precious, and so much of the quality of neuronic snapshots of the epics that were their lives.

Kyrie eleison.

Lord have mercy, indeed.