The great blue heron stood immobile in the creek. I don’t usually see them standing exposed in the open water around here, especially at 2:00 in the morning close to the road.
Surprise
Category Archives: Lemon Moment
Escondite Day
It’s Esondite Day. (Escondite is a Spanish word for ‘hiding place.’)
A couple of times in the fall, I collect pounds of acorns, choosing them carefully from the ground and climbing trees to shake the limbs like Cool Hand Luke. If anyone driving down the hill on Appleby wondered why the tree was shaking, now they know.
This time, I also have a bag of dried corn for these darn squirrels.
And of course, the perfect place to place them.
If you didn’t know, this time of year is prime hoarding and burying time for our local squirrels. They absolutely love getting green ones so that they can bury them and let them ferment and ripen. It saves the squirrels time and energy. Granted, you’re going to have to shake the tree like hell or climb one to get the really good green ones that won’t fall for a while.
I would not have guessed that it would be 80° on October 23rd, or that actual mosquitoes would nip at me as I loaded the tree and the fence line with treats.
Duh!
I passed through my old favorite go-to spot near Gordon Long park. I laughed, looking at the oil stain in front of the steep incline going across the water dam on Scull creek.
For those who didn’t see the picture, someone drove a U-Haul van from Drake Street across the serpentine new trail that connects to The Greenway by the park. They got stuck and teeter-tottered on the concrete drop off as they tried to use the trail as a highway.
I hollered, “Watch out for U-Hauls” to a few people.
If it can happen once, it can happen again.
PS Scull Creek was named after a family rather than a skull. I tell everyone a completely different origin story if it comes up. It’s our job to make local history as argumentative as possible.
Of Golden
A special someone of kindred spirit surprised me with a book in the mail. She took the time to conceal it inside bright paper, obviously appropriating one of my favorite ways to conceal a gift.
I don’t check my mail very often. Or anyone else’s, for that matter, in case you were wondering. I walked over to throw something in the communal trash. Without realizing I was doing it, I meandered over and opened my mailbox and realized that I had a surprise.
Because I am always laden with both markers and scalpel, I opened it under the clearest October sky you can imagine.
Because she is an ardent bibliophile, I knew the book would have special personal meaning just for me.
It was her inscription written inside the cover that wounded me joyfully. I reread it and suddenly seemed to have dust in my eyes, unseen particles that made them teary.
I would never be so gauche as to mention Marjay by name, or to publicly thank her for the kindness. She not only gave me a surprise, but also a little universe inside a book that she thinks I already live inside, wrapped a little like I might.
I’m certain I will love the imaginary world in this book. I’ll read it with my recently restored eyes. And probably finish it with a rejuvenated heart.
Color
Just a little color at 7:09 p.m. A shot taken of the beautiful color-shifting sky, from behind my new bottle light project.
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Moment
I took this picture after the one I posted last night of the beautiful bottle lights competing with the sunset for color dominance.
I watched her sit on the tailgate of my neighbor Mark’s truck, taking pictures and trying to capture the same brilliance I was seeing. I don’t know her at all, but she’s a young mother. You can’t see her kid sitting beside her playing because the truck bed obscures it. It’s a memory for her, and a cotidian moment that can’t be expressed adequately with words.
She’s gonna be fine as long as she keeps trying to capture what she sees.
Fall Fell
I took the picture around 12:30. I knew I needed to walk up the hill and stand where the wind would push hard. It sounded like several hundred pieces of paper being rubbed together by a mob of angry teachers.
When the drops started at 12:47, the change in the smell was dramatic. You can probably imagine the smell from the picture. I felt truly young for a moment. In part because I was alone up there.
I zigzagged down the hill a bit and stood under the open spot in the canopy I discovered a couple of months ago. The wind found me again as I became a little soaked.
The moment was fall in a way that can be experienced but rarely described.
Immerse
What used to be beautiful, uninterrupted backwoods now has a modern trail running through it. A dad with his two kids told me this afternoon that they will soon put in a huge elevated bridge across the creek. I’ll have to find a way to get down past it, even if I have to hang a climbing rope ladder on it.
I don’t want to traverse. I want to immerse. Convenient rarely equals joyful on a long timeline. If it were true, all of our fast vehicles and massive roads would have led us to be happier.
What used to be a massive cattail marsh is now just a small patch. I remembered last year after most of the hummingbirds migrated that it was one of the last places to be abandoned by these little jet fighters. I wasn’t disappointed this afternoon. There was a small squadron of the hummingbirds there, joyfully feeding on the little red wildflowers growing around the cattails.
As for birds, my Merlin app confirmed what my eyes were seeing. It tracked 36 different kinds of birds. I’m certain some of them were migratory, unlike me, who will return more frequently now that it’s rained and the weather is cooling.
When I arrived at the creek, an older man stood on the low water dam looking down at a turtle with a little bit of damage on its back. He told me his dogs had gotten a hold of it and that he feared it wasn’t alive. He left before he found out otherwise. The turtle came out of its shell and then I had to rescue it from one of the flow drainage pipes running under the low water dam.
The dad I mentioned earlier in the post took the opportunity to talk to his two kids about turtles and nature. I waded up into the creek away from them. The little boy was jealous that I was allowed to roll up my pants and walk barefoot in the middle of the creek. I heard the dad tell him that the next time they came, they would all go into the creek without shoes.
I never see people my age roll up their pants and get in the water. It’s their loss. Sure, I can slip and fall in. It’s happened before. And I hope it happens again. Everything comes with a price and a risk. Just as much as the decision to play it safe.
Some bastard with chalk defiled an offshoot of the trail. It’s so strange that he used red for the hat and orange for the stick body. Who in the hell carries chalk out across a creek? Crazy people, that’s who.
Sunrise Tunnel
The briefly lived September sunrise tunnel over the crest of Appleby.
Why does the car cresting look like an antique car?
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Smart!
I was ambling out of a building today.
“Uncle Richard!” It was a high-pitched little girl’s voice. Looking up, I saw the most precious little girl with brightly colored glasses smiling at me. She was probably 5 years old.
Her mom stopped and softly told her that I wasn’t her uncle.
Looking at me, the mom said that I did look extremely similar to her brother-in-law.
I was going to ask if he was prone to wearing brightly colored glasses, but the little girl spoke again.
“What’s your name?”
“Do you want to play Rumpelstiltskin? I’ll give you 27 guesses.”
This is where it got fascinating.
The little girl smiled. “I don’t need any guesses. Your name is X.”
I know I looked stupid for a couple of seconds. It’s not just that I forgot about my name badge. No one looking at it ever correctly assumes that the big X on there is my name. As far as I can tell, only psychopaths and weirdos have names like mine.
“How do you know that?”
“Your name is in the corresponding space for names.”
I laughed and looked at her mom in surprise. For a child that age, her vocabulary and logical deduction about my name and badge was truly astonishing.
“You are a very smart girl aren’t you?”
“I hope I will be.”
“Say hello to your uncle Richard for me, okay?”
The little girl smiled. “Of course.”
I would say that I thought I might have just met one of our future presidents. But she’s much too smart for that.
PS The picture is one of the talkative and quarrelsome crows that likes to fly by me.
