NOVEMBER MORNING

I have to leave before sunrise on my morning walks to be home in time to get ready for work. So I usually don't take my camera along. That would guarantee losing track of time and being late. Today I was on call so I took the camera and am including shots of a park on one of my walking routes.

Sunrise

New Ice

Frosty Seating

Zen Garden

Maaaahm. Have you seen my coat?

Give thanks for all that is good in your life!

No posts until Monday. We will be hosting eighteen guests from out of town and we are going to PARTY! (CA fam--wish you were here!)

A COLD ONE

My photo of a view east of our town.



My predawn walk was a brisk one. The moon hung like a sliver of ice over the southeast and the dark sky was cloudless. I didn’t look at the temperature before I left the house and, although I was dressed warm, I was not prepared for the sting of the air on my face. Wow! But, no matter, in a few minutes the bare skin was numb. My breath fogged up my glasses, and my windbreaker took on a rattley sound as I walked through the park. When I got to the campus I could see a great change had happened. The place is normally an anthill of activity even early in the morning. But the students have gone on Thanksgiving break. With it being so cold and still; I got the feeling I was in one of those sci-fi movies where everything had turned to stone or stopped in time and I was the only thing moving. The streets were so quiet that I walked diagonally across an intersection that is famous for texting drivers taking out pedestrians talking on cell phones. The campus-grounds crew had put up marker rods along the sidewalks to give the snow removal workers an idea of where to go when real winter hits any time in the near future. They had also set up the life-size nativity by the fine arts building. The figures seem to be huddled around a heater grate in the ground. When I got home I looked at the thermometer. Fifteen degrees (that's minus nine celsius)! No wonder I could not feel my face! Brrrr!

DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?

This morning’s walk took me back around the pond. It was dark when I left the house. Orion and his dog were still visible in the southwest. The streets were quiet except for the distant growl of traffic on the four-lane. By the time I got to the water, the earth had rolled over toward the sun enough that I could see the silhouettes of a few wild ducks. Their quacking sounded like they were laughing at hilarious jokes. A whisper of breeze came up and rippled the top of the pond until it looked like wrinkled stainless steel. I startled a flock of Canada geese and they took off with a lot of honking and flapping. More ducks joined their comedian friends, their wings whistling as the circled in for a landing. The trumpeter swans had moved on. Down at the water’s edge I heard a quiet splash as a muskrat dove for cover. Further along there was a quiet rustle as a white tail doe and her adolescent fawn bounced over some brush and retreated waving their tails like surrender flags. There were more bird calls along the river. By the time my path circled back, the wind had picked up and carried the sounds of the town waking up.

It is times like these that make me think that wearing headphones during a morning walk is like holding your nose in a pastry shop.