Tranquility, just a few steps from the highway

We’re lucky at Joshua’s Trust. Among the views, the array of plant life, birds, wetlands streams and brooks, you can get a good hike under your feet. Slopes that are alternately gentle and steep, you’ll be glad you brought a thermos of cold water as you stop to catch your breath at the overlook.

But not all our properties offer a rigorous climb or even a long walk. No, that’s not the point at Owen’s Mere, with its 8.8 acres. Still it’s one of my favorite properties. It’s a refuge betwixt and between UConn and the sometimes quick traffic on South Eagleville Road. A short loop through a wood lot, with exits to South Eagleville and Separatist roads, a mid-point pond with as earthen berm dam and the west-running King’s Brook on either side and a bench at the pond’s edge. Traffic is audible, but dulled as if the property begs a moment’s quiet, a slice of time to yourself, to recharge your batteries even if you really haven’t left the world behind.

Owen’s Mere

Just across South Eagleville Road, Dunham Woods Preserves offers its own 17 acres, a view of Dunham Pond and the kind of quiet that calms the day and rewards a slow pace. Just enough to get the change of scenery before life, commitments and responsibilities call you back – you could leave this small area better prepared for what’s next.

That’s the miracle of nature, isn’t it? The antidote for stress, the cooling of anxieties, the welcome change of disposition, the nourishing of spirit as you see the red flash of color on that black bird sitting on the cat o nine tail, the deer deftly leaping a series of felled trees, or the sound of the pileated woodpecker yet unseen.

Come to Holt-Kinney or Dorothy Goodwin Step through Bradley Buchanan and save Coney Rock for when time is not precious. A short walk is sometimes enough to perfect the day.