At last, as I hoped, we received our best snow well into spring, two storms in one week, beautifully blanketing the land, finally whitening our most revered neighbor, and sending Juni B. into paroxysms of glee!
I, this morning, with remnants of meals past, made a most delicious bread pudding, not quite in celebration, because it wasn’t as deliberate as that, but certainly elevating the mood of the day.
Sunday with our favorite neighbors to celebrate two birthdays, age four and five. Woot!
A lovely Portland morning, me and Juni B. up and roaming, every sound hushed under the weight of the mist. Every scent heightened, the new leaves, the dry flaxen grass, the unfortunate rabbit killed under the tree of the top photo, forefoot and tail and fluff in the underbrush and Juniper whimpering to please investigate. Never have I felt more observed by the animals, seen and unseen, wing beats and calls, rustles and thumps. Crows, jays, towhees, and coyote, perhaps?
Today is a big day for us. After thirteen years to to-ing and fro-ing in a Mini Cooper, from one side of the country to the other, we are reuniting with our first love. A Subaru. The toll of a low clearance vehicle, scrape, scrape, scrape, and what now seems like an impossibly small space having finally, oddly, gotten to us. Our 50’s era garage is just wide enough and plenty long for what, in comparison, will be akin to driving a school bus.
Like most of what I have left behind in this life, I will not miss it. We had our good times and our stellar fuel economy (goodbye 42 MPG on the highway!) and fun zips around winding bending roads, but it’s time to move forward. It’s time for adventures on bumpy back roads without worry (or at least far less) of getting stuck. It’s time for car camping with our favorite canine, lying flat as a pancake in the back. It’s time for having more than one human passenger, save that of a child. It’s time for car loads of plants and other miscellany that need not be carefully balanced and protruding, clown-like, out the front windows of the car. Oh boy, oh boy, it is time.
Let’s go!
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
Ralph Ellison
Tags: Quoting
So maybe this IS turning into a doggy blog. Seriously. Look at her, like she was posing in her new backpack, but really only eager to go, go, go. When we adopted Ms. Juni B., we told the rescue we wanted a medium to low energy dog, because, though it may not seem so right now, we want our life to be about other wonderfulness, too. And she was low energy, at first, utterly pooped after a thirty minute gambit through the neighborhood. But now, this little whippersnapper gets an hour-plus every morning and 20-45 minutes every afternoon, like it ain’t no thang, smiling and skipping and hopping along.
This beautiful hike, some 6.5 miles in length, a good quarter of it up hill, did not so much as slow dear Juniper down, even while sporting her adorable backpack loaded with water, pop-up bowls and kibble. The girl is a machine! And so we are also becoming them. My gams are gonna be glorious, I tell you!
And it was wonderful, with our first pulsatilla sprout spotted springing near Bear Creek, the scent of evergreens in bright sunshine, froth of nascent leaves dotting trees and shrubs, all tiny promises of new worlds amongst last year’s leaves. Happy Spring!
Tags: Colorado Springs
