a good thing to walk out in the morning fog... the morning chill... out into the birdsinging... frogchirping... wormcreeping dawn... aural sex... here i am... they cry... take me... i got the best stuff for a new generation... come on over here, bubba...

sorry... i am not romanticizing... what meager biology i have tells me that's what it is... i've been there all week... dodging rainstorms, i slept late on monday and this morning... made up for this morning's lapse by a quick one around the trail in this afternoon's glorious mugginess... the swamps are high.

most days this week i walked the track... don't care much to wander the trail when the sun's not quite up... specially with those deer killers and deer munchers wandering about... did you hear about the fellow whose tiny dog got snatched by a coyote the other day... found the dog off some distance alive but wounded... you may think that's what he gets for having a dog the size and shape of a large hamster... but they were on his back porch when the brazen coyote struck... surely a guy's own porch should be off limits to the dastardly proto-doggies... but it's a wild wild world...

most days i walked the track marvelling at the earthworms crawling at right angles to my path, mostly... i had to feel sorry for the fellas running parallel to my own stride... guys, i thought, you'll never see wet grass green dirty darkness again... yr birdfood now... still, i tried not to splatter them before their time... and that took some fancy footwork on some sections of track...

(you know, i like this walking - eventually running? - thing so much... why don't i keep it up all year... why do i let the colder weather drive me indoors away from the birds and bugs trees and puddles i love... turning me into some chubby white biscuit boy... when my heart's in the motion...)

such are my big adventures outdoors... indoors there are others... like trying to maintain meaningful classes for seniors when on any given day half will be missing or half will walk out mid-period (as one group did today) because they are off to this or that field trip... this or that other a p test... it's looney... and the sophomores have been in computers for the past two days pluggin away at their gatsby project... things are going well... maybe i'll let you take a peek when they're done...

we've got lilacs

click the picture for a somewhat larger view... this afternoon during my lunch period i stood in the middle of this one clump of bushes... breathing deep getting stoned on the thick aroma... click click...

and we've got tulip

(i know it's out of focus... i like it out of focus) almost literally... tulip... singular... since the deer stage nightly raids to chomp these beauties down to weeping stumps... enough to make a guy dream of posting hungry coyote at lawn's edge... click the picture for a somewhat bigger blur...

The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man's invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog's way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.

E. B. White

 

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