Blog-azic

Sassafras Trail. Paved easy road. Down into the hollow. Expanses of club moss. The laurel hollows. Tulip poplars. Another family with a whining child, who silenced as we past and started again when we got further. Coaxing Adella for more steps. Buckeye Recreation Center. A wonder of a play ground, but closed. Adella tried to go under the caution tape around it. Instead, we went down, down a rocky, laurel ravine to a loudly rushing mountain stream. The trail followed along side the stream until it passed over via a bridge at a waterfall. On the other side, Adella splashed in the feeder streams and seep water. Settling on an offer. Pizza (hidden from Adella) and movie.

Overlook Trail, a climb at elevation with child in arms. Dense forest over boulder bones. The dirt, where present, dark and spongy. Lake Coffey to Lower Pond Creek Trail. Hiking up to the same park from the morn. Around the lake and over boardwalks. The beeches looked strange, kind of gnarled. I came to know that they were the garden variety beech, but that a disease was wiping them out. It explained the dead, and felled beech at our cabin that so interested Adella, and the dying beech still upright beside it.

 A tiny sliver of moon hangs in the west. As it slips down, it rings round. This is the phase I love best. After the photographer came for staging photos, and I could finally let my breath out, I closed my office door and laid on the floor, unable to concentrate on work, and I listened to my thoughts running over each other. I tried to calm my mind and clear my head, but I was too tired. It’s taken days to recover a sense of peace, and it’s even some low stress state and not true calm. But such is my life now. We went due East, turned off of I-40, and headed to the hill country. When we stopped in Boone for groceries, Susan took the family to a small garden behind the store, and I met them there. It was cool, and lush, and is probably the closest I’ve come to the Ohio clime. In fact, I later found that both Beech Mountain and the Lake Erie Basin have the same climate type (called the humid continental climate). We twisted up from Banner Elk to Beech Mountain, and found our cabin clingi

 Adella had a clear moment of growth today. I found her and Mom in the bedroom playing on the floor, and I sat down and started to chat with Susan. While talking, Adella crawled on Mom's leg and bit her! Mom exclaimed. I signed "it hurts" and pointed to the spot where Adella bit. She stared blankly at us for a few seconds. Then her lower lip waxed, protruded, and trembled. Tears welled in her eyes. Mom picked her up and held her close and in a few moments, she was laughing again. Today she saw first, that she can hurt people, and second that Mom and Dad expected something of her that she didn't attain. 

 For weeks, we had a dry spell with relatively cool weather and sun and wind. I spent a whole week watering grass seed twice a day. Then, on a dime, the weather turned and we had buckets of rain. The ground is now soggy, and the air is very humid. We caught New Hope Creek at the end of the dry and after the deluge.  After a few weeks exploring the Little Creek Waterfoul Impoundment, we started hiking Duke Forest. That first day, we parked on the roadside behind a long line of cars and hiked in. A large timeline sign reviewed the history of the land: clearcut, managed forest, selected cuts. We went down to the river, cautiously stepping off the trail to avoid our fellow hikers. It was a short loop and then back up a different hollow, baby now switched from Susan to me. The next time, we went across from a Durham park to a lush green bottomland forest, with giant sycamores (a treat in this area) and equally impressive tulip polars and a shurb layer of spice bush and pawpaw and jack-in-th

This year is our five year wedding anniversary. I want to check-in with the wedding party and musicians to see how they are. The desire has been rolling in me for a while. It's affecting my dreams, now.  I've been dreaming of people I know, err knew. People I've left behind, unfortunately. People with whom I should reconnect. First, it was Dianne, a violin player I gigged with. I was traveling far away in the dream, and somehow I met her. We may have played a little music. Then, it was Rob, an NC friend who is now in SF, CA. I dreamt my family visted his family in SF. His house was my old co-op though. He and I snuck off, smoked a joint, and he took me for a drive. His car (in fact lots of cars could) drive on water, right over the Bay.