Walking in the woods this afternoon with my wife, she kept spotting animals. She always sees them first. (That is, both before I see the animals, and before the animals see her.) I saw a couple birds after she pointed them out. I heard a woodpecker a few times.
Two squirrels I didn’t see at all.
We walked to a pond where a beaver lives, or at least works. You know beavers. Many trees had been chewed down and debarked.
We walked past another, smaller pond where I saw something small and red swimming in the water. I stopped and took a more careful look, and saw that it was a dark orange goldfish, about six inches long. Then I saw another. The longer I looked, the more I saw. By the time we finally left, the pond was full of reddish-orange goldfish.
This is the magic realist story of the day at our house.
Once you set foot on the path, the goldfish are everywhere.