Just a day or two ago, I lay looking up at the bright yellow leaves still clinging to the boughs of the maple trees. Loosened by a slight breeze, a few of them drifted downward to finally meet with the soft slumber of the dirt, the crisp, the dead. To my left, tall pine trees spread their weighty arms, still full of green, still smelling dark and clean.  

Time takes time. It is what they tell us—the wise who have traversed the path before us and the flippant who want us to shut up. Most of us are stuck somewhere in the middle, petulantly  wishing time would not take so much time and then wishing it would just slow down.

Letchworth State Park, the park in which I gazed up at the trees, has long been a part of my life. Its uneven stone steps, put in piece by piece by the CCC workers, lead along the rolling lip of the gorge close enough to the waterfalls to feel the spray of the water. I carefully stepped down those staircases as a toddler and flew up them as a teenager. Now nearing my thirties, I huff my way up.

This park has always been a place of transformation and inspiration. 

It was here I saw a jogger flying down the wooded paths, so strong and free. The image captured my mind. I would do that–I would become strong enough to run and not stop for breath. I would become strong enough to travel twenty-six miles with only determination and my own two feet. 

One golden summer in college, I drove down to the park each week. Without a GPS I made wrong turns down bumpy farmer’s roads, the families watching me from their porches. Eventually, I memorized the route, naming each of the small towns as I passed: York, Leicester, Perry, and Castile. It was that summer, on those hikes, that I came to not only tolerate solitude, but love my own company. 

And it was on a bench in front of the Upper Falls that my then-boyfriend knelt before me, asking to be mine forever. 

As trite as it sounds, the Genesse River has carved away at the falls over countless years, exposing stones from millions of years ago. Time takes time. The trees themselves are much older than me and each year they do this dance with the sun and gravity. Time takes time.

I have discovered that I am not a very patient person. Not with God and not with myself. Once an idea enters my head, I would like it to be completed, finished, over with. This inclination has led me to fall headlong into projects with a determination not unlike the river’s dutiful flowing, but in a much greater hurry.

Time feels like a necessary evil, like cleaning the toilet, or a barrier between me and the next great moment, like a long que.

But I’m trying to be patient, I promise. It’s what they say to do: to wait, to persevere, to hold on even past hoping.

Perhaps Letchworth, grounded in its own timelessness, can work its magic once more.