6-6-16

at a point where i no longer want to ‘go to town’ – in our case, now, it means going down a spectacular canyon, about twenty minutes, to a town that is twenty or thirty degrees hotter, very sunny, and tucked intensely against the mountains we are staying in. i want to stay and write, but the family has returned, making six people in the cabin, and opening the door to the back porch, which is empty and cool, lets in a handful of moths, and we have a couple of kids who still get nervous about moths, I’m not sure why. You can get rid of moths by turning lights on outside, if you have them, and then turning them off inside, and leaving the doors open. The air is fresh here, piney and wet, cool. i’d like to keep the doors open all the time, but now there are too many dogs. the dogs feel like they have to defend us from all the neighboring wildlife.

five deer crossed our path the other day when we were giving the black lab a walk. the lab tugged hard at the leash; she was dying to go chase those deer. Not sure what she was planning to do if she caught them, but there she was, in a mountain meadow, with a powerful itch, tugging at the line. i held tight; i didn’t want to lose her.

the ‘meta’ is my favorite place on earth, just a short maybe half-mile hike from our door. our path goes past a house or two, and on a rocky old road, but the ‘meta’ is the real thing, an open place in the middle of a mountain forest. no wonder those deer wanted a piece of it. lots of good things for deer to eat out there, and no end of beautiful days to go get it.

finally had to go to town today – we were after a birthday present and some other supplies – and so i did, and sure enough, twenty degrees hotter, sun beating down, and people, I swear, are much different down there. more serious, maybe, or having a harder time making it. a couple of them engaged me in conversation – i felt like i was making their day, just being so different. up here, on the mountain, a policeman pulled over, just to introduce himself, really – wanted to know where i lived. i told him. in a town of less than a thousand, what do you expect? I had a wide smile. Just leaving my door, we’re on a kind of ridge – we look out at white sands, we see a hilly mountain road cut up across the highway; we can see the clouds coming up through the high mountains, as the town basically sits in them. the cool cloudy breeze feels so good after two years of texas. on the hill, now, and feeling like i don’t want to come back down.