Posts Tagged ‘driving home’
Parched Earth
We zoomed home without incident yesterday, except for one unsettling moment at a construction site. Signs were warning of the road work ahead, so I wasn’t surprised when traffic came to a halt. The shock came when the large truck we were following began moving, revealing many emergency vehicles with flashing lights instead of construction equipment.
There was an ambulance and a firetruck, two damaged vehicles, and a significant number of former occupants congregated nearby. Behind all the EMS personnel stood all the construction crews biding their time until the scene was turned back over to them.
The dew point temperature when we left Hayward read 79°F, with temps already in the 80s. The level of mugginess was downright tropical. I checked the reading for 125 miles away at home and found the same result. Yuck.
What we found when we arrived at our property was a very parched earth. Wherever trees shaded the grass, it looked a healthy green. Anywhere the sun was baking the turf, it was visibly brittle and fading to beige.
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Asher met us with surprising calm, acknowledging our return with a mere lean against each of us in turn for some scratches. It was a greeting we appreciated. He seems so well-adjusted and content with the living conditions we are providing for him. It helps to have great animal sitters covering our absences.
There wasn’t a lot we could do to offer the horses relief from the heat. Cyndie put fly masks on to give their eyes a break from the nagging pests and turned up the speed on the fans aimed under the overhang.
It looked like the horses might have been digging for water in the dry bed of Paddock Lake. They don’t normally mess with it after the water evaporates, leaving the bottom to become covered with a cracked, dried mud base. Now it looks a bit like they are creating a sandbox.
We need rain. I’m not exactly comforted by the forecast that suggests chances of storms on Thursday and Friday after the extremely dangerous tornado that hit Appleton and Menasha in northeastern Wisconsin yesterday. We just want some moisture to fall, and not in the form of 100% humidity. Is a good soaking rain too much to ask?
Our soil is parched, I tell ya. It needs a drink!
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Past
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driving past the crow
that was standing on the side of the road
it is hard to know
if there is someone in particular
who knows where it lives
or will care when it dies
looking back at the stack of cars in the mirror
having successfully passed
the pokey driver at the front
watching the distance between us
grow
my hubris needs control
in the early foggy hours of a Monday
on the way home
from the lake
listening to a random shuffle of songs
auto-magically algorithm-ly selected
to fit the mood of the moment
sending miles and minutes flying
into the past
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Staying Longer
There was a lot of energy this weekend among a large number of visiting guests who happened to be between the ages of newborn to 14. Suddenly, by late afternoon yesterday, everyone had left to return to their homes. It was Sunday night and Cyndie and I didn’t need to go anywhere. The immediate surroundings suddenly took on an entirely different ambiance with the change from squeals and giggles to nothing but ripples on the lake murmuring against the shoreline and the buzzy fluttering of hummingbirds outside the deck door.
As glorious as it is to experience the community of families that are Wildwood, it is a priceless privilege to know the serenity of this place when we are able to be here alone in the unrivaled north woods environment.
We only stayed one night longer than everyone else. This morning we will drive home to spend a few days at our other paradise.
Counting our blessings all the way.
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Very Wet
Yesterday was a beautiful day and we spent the middle hours of it in moderate traffic driving home from the lake. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me more to have driven up to that beautiful place and then experience most of the time confined indoors due to incredibly wet weather. When it finally turned nice, we were packing up and driving home.
For some reason, I didn’t mind one bit.
Just like that, we were home and it was back to the regular routine. I finished the day mowing our grass. The ground was completely saturated in many areas, surprisingly so in the back yard, to the point that the mower left muddy tire tracks in its wake. There is standing water in multiple places, which I needed to navigate around instead of cutting.
I’m looking forward to the few days of dry weather being forecast for the beginning of this week.
The signal booster I ordered last week is scheduled to arrive Wednesday. Getting it installed and calibrated will become my primary objective on Friday if the weather permits.
If it works as intended, it should significantly reduce the time it takes for me to load photos and program my daily posts. I’m hoping to convert the precious freed up minutes into added sleep time.
Getting more sleep will be a welcome change to my daily routine. I’m hoping my posts will begin to reflect it with a little bit less sleep-typing going on during the processsssssss.
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Relative Something 