Howdy Folks... :)

 

...I guess we got back Friday, before last.  We had a wonderful time, just sitting amid the cardinals (I have never ever seen more).  There were also finches, tit-mice, herons, doves, crows, owls and hawks...  and a family of squirrels.  Mostly we saw...  some we only heard (owls).  It rained only once one night.  There was plenty of fire wood for the place-of-the-fire (hyphenated because I once wrote something somewhere about the place-of-the-fire...)  And it was cool, chilly most of the time.

 

Carole found us a place, a cabin on stilts, between Bastrop and Smithville on FM2571 (real close to a southerly kink in the Colorado River).  Its called The Tree House.  If it weren't day light you'd miss it for sure - which we did, even though day light (But we knew we missed it and turned around immediately, as we had Googled the bejabbers out of the area with their satellite views).

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We didn't do much of anything...  or maybe it was everything.  We basically hung around the cabin from Monday to Friday.  I don't know where the time went....  We survived on Bagels and popcorn.  Well..  I did cook a mess of bacon and eggs once.  And we had a mean salad one night.  You see...  I brought everything but meat.  I lie.  I did bring some English bangers (sausage) and some left over bean soup made with bangers...  Once Carole had mistaken the sour cream for cream cheese.   Mmm...  You ought to try sour cream on bagels!  Really...  It's pretty good!!

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The place was on stilts, as Carole says.  Really, I think the boss-builder-owner simply new that the 100/1000 year flood was a'com'n.  In such an event, this place isn't going nowhere.  And though their armored electrical conduit is a bit rusty, there are plenty of lights below the place to fire up your choice of 4 different BBQ grills.  You could cook a goat on one of them...

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One day, while Carole was journaling, I put on some real clothes, and boots, and went for a stroll.

 

There happens to be this honk'n wash about 100 feet from the cabin, tending to the river.  For years it had, apparently, been the gravitational focus of chunks of antique concrete, rusty pails and whatnot: mostly all absorbed back into the cosmos...  or, maybe, that would be the nano-architecture of sandy loam.  Some kind of good dirt, anyway.

 

I ran on-up-in-their, as the bruthahs would say, with my camera.  I didn't know it was an ancient dump until I was committed... (20 feet below ground level - in a ditch)  No problem.  I cut my teeth on ditches!! 

 

It was really pretty nice.  Not nasty, as one would think about historical dumps.  I descended amid vines and hackberries to the...  I guess the level where the river cleans things out periodically.  However, that had not been too recently.  There was brush everywhere.  So, I stood at the mouth of the ditch, as it emptied into a proximate floodplain, and looked at weeds... and big'ol cottonwoods going up forever.  I could see the creek here and there through the brush....  but I wasn't up to gett'n in there right at the moment.

 

So I back tracked, back into my ditch.  This time I took the time to look at the dirt walls and strata and whatnot.  In one place the dirt had eroded away from everything while a tree grew...  grew into a layer of some bygone age: tree meets the Jurassic strata...  or sometime.  The strata layer was aggregate-like, several feet below the surface, under mostly topsoil looking dirt.

 

I had to keep a watch out for poison ivy - as it really was wanting to get out and get any straggling city-slickers.  As I progressed back up the ditch/wash, I paused to pull old stuff out of it's walls.  Bottles and pails...  Not too old.  Maybe only to the 20s - 50s. 

 

I found a ketchup bottle...  and some old, I don't know what, brown square bottle.  Maybe it had Tums or Maalox in it at one time.  I remember digging up similar bottles while getting fill for the front yard at Marylake.  All the old buried trash around there was from the 20s - 30s era, well at least from where I was getting the fill dirt.

 

So... I gathered my treasures into a pail with-not-much-bottom-left-in-it:  that, and my camera and a few rocks I had to have.  I made my way through the tangle of loose rocks, dirt and poison ivy. Up up up.  I think I paused to admire some dirt, or maybe I spied an artifact...  Be that as it may, my next focused sight was the canopy of the trees, w-a-y up there...  way past the top of the ditch.  You see...  I had stumbled.

 

Things look pretty neat from the perspective of a head down, negative 25 degree inclination, in the bottom of an ancient ditch.  If I hadn't been trying to haul my finds in a pail with only half a bottom I might have balanced a little better.  Anyway...  It was no big thing, except when I got up I noticed the middle of my back had been pressed squarely upon some poison ivy.  I had a good thick shirt on so I figured "no big deal."  I did give up my rusty pail though, and hauled my little brown bottle, by hand, the rest of the way out of the ditch.

 

All of the sudden it strikes me that the above might make a good parable of some sort...  Like...  "As you finally make your way to the bottom of the ditch of life and, taking note of how you really would rather not be there, and decide to turn around...  as you make your way back up the ditch, either: 1) don't dawdle with distractions or, 2)  don't bother lugging any treasures other that the truly important.  And if you stumble...  Don't cuss much.  And when you're done with your itch'n and your little-cuss, just appreciate the tree tops... and how the blue of the sky looks behind them.  That will get you the rest of the way out.   But above all,  do not leave the little brown jug.  It turns out that's why we're let to go down the ditch to begin with...  To git that jug...  and to think about how it never goes empty... (1 Kings 17:14)  

 

*For those who've persevered thus: Bonus Allegory.

 

...if you see a guy behind a curtain, pay no heed!!  You'll just end up on a wild goose chase.  Except... the geese there are flying monkeys that'll scare the bejabbers out of you... !   And you'll never get out of the ditch. 

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Oh well, I'm back...

 

On two separate days I had the feeling that we were so far enough out into the country, and in a place where private property still means "don't tread on me," that I unzipped my 92 F and, on day one, hauled it out to the balcony for single shot free fire...

 

That 100 year old elm, 50 yards off, never stood a chance...

 

Not having heard the report of a 9 mm for 10 years or so, I had this shriveling feeling...  and 'thought I'd better git before the sheriff got there (this would be the paranoia that sets into folk that live in the city too long).

 

Carole would have none of it.  I tried to get her to take a shot.  Though I assured her, with many pleadings, that it's safer than ditches...  Nope!

 

On day two,  I challenged a mean Oak on the other end of the yard (13 acres)...  Hinky Oak 'dared to shade me...

 

"Oak,"  I said.  "It's time you and me settled things!"

 

The Oak said nothing, though he looked at me like I was retarded...  which made me mad, by golly!

 

And, faster than Jackie Chan...  blam.. blam.. [ears re-acclimating to silence and/or recovering from unnecessary artillery.]

 

The Oak... still looked at me like I was retarded.  After all, how many folks come to shoot you for your shade... :?  Plus,  I really hadn't overcome that urban-tainted psyche...  "The sheriff's going to get you for sure, fool!"  And "...now you got that chemical residue all over you, you're a goner, man.  Slammer for you!"

 

I took a nap and got over it...

 

(for the shocked, or concerned, please note in pistol image: finger not on trigger, safety-lever: on, magazine-disengaged, nothing in chamber-take my word for it, muzzle pointed in generally downward direction, arm immediately scabbarded after photo.  One caveat: taking a picture of yourself, which I'm not saying it's me, with a gun is an open invitation to the ACLU to rip you bad for scaring someone... Great boogly BOO!!  Oh my....  Additional documentation:  My daddy taught me what guns were for, and what they could do 40 years ago, which should tell you everything you need to know.  And if that's not enough, my uncle John trusted me;  I got the merit badge in the Boy Scouts; I got 100% on the shooting portion my CWP;  the guns in my cabinet are covered with dust - what can I say...  I'm almost old.)

 

Later I went down stairs and got another sheet full of firewood for the evening fire.   We listened to satellite music, as I mocked myself in a Pakistani accent...  "Silly customer, you can hurt a Twinkie!"  (Simpson's. Circa 21st century)

 

"Sheets" is how I lugged firewood, Santy-Claus style, from the shed 50 yards away, up 20 steps, to our wonderful place-of-the-fire in the tree-tops.  How many ricks a week can you lug in a sheet? :)   

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Stillness and quiet.  My wife gave these to me this past week.  I read many pages of the bible, 'reflected for many hours on the meanings of Words we don't usually give the time of day to, and I journaled myself some words that would surely be evidence of my not being totally with-it for most of Mankind.  That's okay...  One day we'll, all together, sit around the place-of-the-fire, laugh... and take a few pot shots off the balcony.

 

Okay...  I guess I'd better wrap it up.

 

I think I have a workable harmony of the socially acceptable and the heinously scandalous.  Plus...  I've run my spell-checker many times...

 

Your Husband, Son, Brother, Nephew, Uncle, Cousin and Friend in the Lord...

 

Tom and/or Tobias