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.
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...
