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Thursday, July 17, 2008

a practically perfect day

Yesterday I had a wholly wonderful day. I'd planned to do the usual things--breakfast, stretch, email, work on Hild, lunch, work on Hild, beer, dinner--but the weather here was totally, spot-on perfect this morning, so after breakfast Kelley said, Hey, wanna go to the park?

We did. And the park was amazing. First of all, the sky was a hard, clear blue. The Olympics were out. The Sound was blue and green. And two ospreys were circling and diving for fish (and missing, all the time; must be young ones). The patterns on the underside of their wings was just, well, it was astonishing. And they were right there.



No, I didn't take this pic; it's a public domain photo from Wikipedia

And while we were being gobsmacked and delighted, we saw a chipmunk running along a fence. And we smiled. And then a marten exploded out of the bushes and the chipmunk zipped--I've never seen anything move as fast--along that rail and then started shrieking at that marten.

A marten.


ditto: photo by anonymous in public domain

Wow. I didn't even know there were martens here in Seattle. It was beautiful: small, tight, one long glossy predatory muscle. And then a pair of birds I'd never seen before started trading singing insults--oh you could tell they were insults. Seriously. Then I watched a zillion sand-burrowing wasps doing apparently pointless things, like piling on top of each other, and bumping into each other, and digging holes and scuttling backwards. It was like watching a flea circus. And all this entertainment was free.

At this point, we thought, Hey, the world is a marvel, let's go explore more. So we had lunch at a Moroccan place we'd never noticed before, rootled through the tat in an 'antiques'/consignment store, and had a latte in a new coffeehouse. Then we came home, smiling, and I suddenly thought of something I really wanted to add to Hild.

All in all a miraculous day. Nothing profound to say, I just wanted to share.

Tomorrow is audio day. I'm dithering between a song, something I wrote for Kelley while we were apart all those years ago, or a reading of a very short story for Australian radio. Decisions, decisions...

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