The Trail Was Half Ice and I Went Anyway

December decided to be actual winter this week, which I apparently took as a personal invitation. I drove out to Millbrook State Park on Friday morning with no particular plan, I just needed to be somewhere that wasn't my apartment, somewhere with trees and cold air and no internet connection. The parking lot had maybe two other cars in it. The trail map at the trailhead was sun-faded and half-illegible, which felt right somehow.

The first half of the trail follows a creek, and in December that creek is doing interesting things, there were sections of ice at the edges, leaf skeletons frozen mid-surface, the water dark and slow underneath. I crouched down to look at one for way too long.

the frozen creek had my full attention

There was nobody around to tell me to keep moving, so I just stayed there until the cold through my gloves got insistent about it.

The trail ends at a small overlook, nothing dramatic, just a clearing where the trees step back and you can see the valley going grey-blue into the distance. I sat on a boulder up there for a while. My brain had been doing this thing lately where it keeps replaying the semester, the final portfolio, the instructor's note in the margin, the classmate's comment still sitting in my inbox like something I haven't figured out what to do with yet. Up on that overlook, none of it felt urgent. It just felt like winter, which is its own kind of answer.

I drove home with the heat on full and my trail runners still damp. I'm already thinking about going back in the spring when the creek is running loud. But honestly? The frozen version might be better. Quiet things often are.