by compound complex 293 Replies latest jw friends
It's funny Lady Lee, this is exactly where I saw him on the first day. I was later getting out yesterday, I'm wondering if that has anything to do with it. Here are some more from yesterday. I'm just loving my new neighborhood!
You can just see a little brown head poking up in this brown field. He had friends, they came out of a hole there.
Finding a small window of settled weather this morning, I ventured forth on a brisk uphill walk through my usual haunts. Actually, the ambulations became brisker as the roadway leveled off and my huffs and puffs regulated. The sky was piled high with mountains of vanilla-cream clouds, spilling luxuriantly one over the other so that there was no discernible beginning nor end of their cumulative mass. Light and shadow, in particularly sharp definition (given the sun's ins and outs), highlighted the contours of the towering meringue peaks.
I found a neighborhood home empty and for sale. A foreclosure. Wandering cautiously onto the property, I was lured to the deck, which gave onto the most stunning view of a golf course studded with both evergreen and colorful deciduous trees. Tenderly embracing the expansive green were rolling hills whose dusty lumber had been washed clean by the previous evening's downpour. What arrested my gaze, however, was the brilliant light from an otherwise watery sun that flooded Miner's Peak in pearly opalescence.
A genuine showstopper.
Not a day goes by without me noticing nature's beauty. If you have ever played on a private golf course, you'll understand what I'm talking about.
If you have ever played on a private golf course, you'll understand what I'm talking about.
Thanks, golf.
I only observe our golf course, and it is beautiful.
Gratefully,
CoCo
This late afternoon was a perfect time to have remained indoors, curled up cozily in front of the fireplace with a good read. Possessing many a good book but no obvious fireplace, I had to bolt. Cabin fever had gotten the better of me, so I put on a brave face and raincoat and dashed headlong into the spitty, blustery, darkening remains of daylight hours.
Drawn along the same path as yesterday, I surged forward, my frame a near-horizontal incline against the punishing gale. As I approached the same home (the one in foreclosure), I sought shelter under the eaves of the house, which afforded little more than minor relief from the rain but virtually none from the wildly circulating winds. I didn't mind. I knew what lay ahead the moment I stepped out my own front door.
Once again my attention fixed on a Miner's Peak now enveloped in a wild and woolly atmospheric condition so different from that of the day before. Undulating foothills and their timber roiled in a sea of cascading and sprinting vapors. A barely discernible mountain pass was only in evidence because a string of diamond-like automobile headlights was flowing down the distant roadway, cradled within sloping walls of earth, stone and tree.
I've never been this soaked to the bone and loved it so ...
Like a moth to the flame, a poet to the babbling brook, a drunkard to the grog, I was pulled in once again. Whether by simple desire or gravity, who can say. Perhaps the draw was merely a flicker of subconscious recognition of similarities to my childhood home.
Who can say?
My third visit to the bank-owned home with the killer view was yesterday of a morn. Calm is as good as any a word to describe the day and its weather up to that point. I sauntered along from my current digs to my greatly missed, fabled "childhood" home on the hill. Though the look of the sky was an autumnal cool and gray overcast, yet Sol gently, unobtrusively illumined the dirty cotton batting, thereby spreading an expansive cheer and warmth through the vale.
Perched once again on the deck and looking outward with the eyes of a thirteen-year old boy, I was transported back a half century. Having come from the fertile valleys of central California and landing on the highest peak in a little, unincorporated hamlet took all the oxygen from my lungs. It could've been literally, but, of course, you must realize that I'm speaking figuratively.
My family and I were standing on the deck of a home for sale. The old darling was beautifully hewn of stone and rough timber. She was a mere shell - an interior yet to be fitted out - but with such potential. My mother, enamored of the entire package, commented to the owner that only one thing was missing: a view of the ocean. The lady of the house smiled and directed my mother's gaze over to the left. Pointing to a break in the trees on the distant range, May said, "Look, Dear." There, faintly but absolutely, was a sliver of blue crowned by whitecaps.
My "new home," too, affords a Pacific glimmer, one that beckons this grown-up thirteen-year old to cast off.
the denuded branches of the deciduous trees
against the sodden grey of a late autumn sky
could easily be confused with early spring.....
but the apparent chaos of scurried activity
across the leaf litter in the wooded acreage is more
decisively the harbinger of an approaching siege...
creatures tuned into their instincts prepare
as only survivalist can, becoming singularly focused
on securing the means to successfully overwinter in order to
fulfill their commission as progenitors of their kind
it is in this instinct driven world i venture with my canine companions,
whose daily needs propel me, not a whit unwillingly, into this ongoing
quest for preservation of the variant gene pools
mostly it is unseen, unnoticed and uneventful activity…
but every now and again, it becomes imperative to PAY ATTENTION!
that which we call home is a 5 acre parcel above and behind the
small rural town that thinks itself a city, as the welcome signs so boldly claim.
high enough on the hill to sometimes have snow when in town it only rains
we walk various routes, some being forested paths of the school district’s
environmental facility, some being fields on the other edge of town, not a quarter
mile from the shore of the world’s largest surface area fresh water lake, and some
being the recently paved roads of our neighbourhood
it is my practice to wear a bear bell in the forest… a constant indicator to all ursine
canine and the even-toed ungulates of the family cervidae that there be strangers
in their realm …. bear, foxes and deer! oh my!
I do not carry this precaution further than the head of the forest trail, feeling that any of the
aforementioned species would do well to be wary of their encroachment into the boundaries of
human habitation….
granted the lines become obscures when houses on the hill occupy area measured
in terms of acres, but one would imagine the stink our species creates, in terms of lthe olfactory
capabilities and preference of those creatures francis of assisi loved best, would signal a state of high alert
alas and alack, truth be told, I suspect they are all but ruined by an uneasy habituation
here, now is the place this meander has led….. a moment unexpected, not especially welcomed,
but chronicled here as a moment of multiple species intersection
on an early evening walk, beating the setting of the sun by a comfortable measure, less
than a quarter mile from home and hearth, amidst the cadence of dog nails rhythmically
accounting for each footfall that brought us closer to the confines of our shared domicile,
ahead by a less than reassuring distance, from the roadside brush, emerged a black, shiny
shimmery coated bear….. from that instant forward, all hell broke loose
Writing about my neighborhood has put me on the map.
A publication ...
I wish, however, that these thousands of new readers would be able to see for themselves the beauty of my neighborhood.
Words tease and intrigue but can never fully convey what only the eyes might see, the skin feel and the mind interpret as the sublime autumnal experience.
I went out to scoop leaves from the pool this morning, and found this
Thank you, beks!
Someone looks quite at home ...
Far better than a contemptibly small, dirty pond.
CoCo
