Just had to do this again as we came home from running errands in Palmdale. It’s been raining a bit off and on today, and these shafts of sunlight were just breathtaking. We stopped several times along the way.
It’s always great to get off the freeway and see this view. I love that it is immediately country looking.
This road gets flooded when it rains. Probably will be on Saturday.
Medicine cards are something like Tarot cards, except they don’t seem as much aimed at divination as at being thought-provoking.
Or maybe it’s just the way I use them. Pull a card and the animal figure and what it represents help you look at your day or a problem from a different perspective. I like that they are animals rather than people holding cups or swords or whatever. Sometimes they are breathtakingly on-the-nose in identifying my hesitations or issues.I don’t really know what to make of this sort of thing. I use them and enjoy them. There’s something about the element of chance that sparks the divine within us is what I think if I’m pressed to express it.
Images and impressions are always flowing around us, and anything that surprises us into a moment of contemplation in which we capture one of them seems like a positive thing to me.
Yeah, I stole the title from Wallace Stegner. So sue me. [But from what I hear, Wallace Stegner shouldn't be throwing any stones!]
It’s hard to cut back the roses when they start blooming again after Christmas, but January is the time to do it. Here they are on the table on the back deck. Next to them is a piece of a succulant I broke off and will plant.
Also pruned the apple, peach and apricot trees and cut back the Thompson grape vine. And raked leaves, and cut up branches that had fallen down, and left some of them piled for next week’s trash. And helped D get the Christmas lights off the roof.This also doubles as exercise for the day. I feel accomplished.
The frog is there because a frog looking out your front door is supposed to welcome prosperity. We haven’t won the lottery, but things are moving along pretty fluidly, and that feels like prosperity after having struggled for a long time.
The dog. The dog is a door stop. I bought it from one of the catalogues that came to our house after my mother-in-law passed away and we had her mail directed to our house.It’s a replica of a type of cast iron door stop that was popular as far back as the 20s or 30s I suppose. My grandfather made these in a foundry in Indiana. My grandma had one at her house until sometimes in the 80s when it was stolen.
It took me a couple of catalogues to finally give myself permission to spend $40 on a dog door stop, but I am SO glad I did. It’s not the one we had, but I love the way it lets me see my Grandma B’s kitchen.I do have one of the pony doorstops that my Grandpa B made. It holds open the door to my writing studio.
We were walking to the garage, going to a hoot (acoustic music jam, sort of) when I looked up and saw this. Oh…my picture of the day, just waiting for me over the hill!
On our way, we picked up a friend of ours who was just released from prison. He was in because he was drinking before he got on the road, and he crossed the center line on a canyon road and killed a gardener on his way home from work. Desperately injured the other two men in the truck.I think it was a good thing for him to go. Before he went, he was very much torn up about it. He seemed afraid that his friends wouldn’t want to be his friends anymore. Honestly, it was hard to know how to be supportive sometimes, while acknowleging the gravity of what he’d done.
He wasn’t a drunk. He was a man who enjoyed good food and good wine. His experience is a solemn reminder of our obligation to be in control of ourselves when we get behind the wheel.Now he has paid in the time that the judge said he needed to pay. It was an awful ordeal. I know the night still haunts him, but now he can come back knowing he’s done the time, and we can all begin to move forward.I think he’s appreciating views like this these days.
