April 23, 2012

The yard this morning is in full shade, the trees finally all leafed out which generally spells the end of the grass, though it still gets light in the early morning.  All the shadows are moving, the light, golden and bright, winks in the wind.  The two cats are each lying in different sun spots, and the squirrel is giving somone hell, that is such a weird noise they make when doing that, I have mistaken it for a harsh bird call several times only to see the fluffed up, enraged squirrel in some tree, it's tail twitching with fury.

This morning I was thinking about camping up at Kennedy Meadow, a spot we loved, high in the Sierras.  It was one of our favorite places to camp, with a river close by, wide open spaces surrounded by hills and even further by the mountains themselves.  We camped there a lot, in the spring and summers when the kids were small.  It was a special place and we were always glad to go.  We didn't do much family camping after we moved here.  And now . . . I'm too old and creaky for a tent and we don't have the camper any more.  Still on days like this, I would like to go again, to be out in the country, or in the mountains, just seeing someplace else, where there would be other things to notice.  One of the things I remember is the smell of that place, sweet, green, hay-like, with just a tang from the pines, and in some seasons you could pick flowers and smell those, though they had trouble grwoing up there, we generally left them alone and admired from a distance, leaving them for other people to notice.  My kids brought me rocks instead of flowers, some really gorgeous ones, in friendly competition with each other.  I still have a jar of them.

 

I guess when looking for a poem this morning, I was still thinking about camping.

 

When We Sold the Tent

 

When we sold the tent
we threw in the Grand Canyon
with its shawl of pines,
lap full of cones and chipmunks
and crooked seams of river.

 

We let them have the
parched white moonscapes of Utah,
and Colorado's
magnificat of flowers
sunbursting hill after hill.

 

Long gentle stretches
of Wyoming, rain outside
some sad Idaho
town where the children, giddy
with strange places, clowned all night.

 

Eyes like small veiled moons
circling our single light, sleek
shadows with pawprints,
all went with the outfit; and
youth, a river of campfires

 

Rhina P. Espailat

 

I've never been to Wyoming or Idaho, I'm sure they have their own special places of beauty.  We did visit Rhyolite in Nevada, an old ghost town with a neat house made out of all kinds of bottles, but mostly beer, and a railroad car there.   It was empty mostly when we visitied, I don't think there was another soul in the place, just our family.  Some skeletal buildings and abandoned mining equpment.  Now I hear there is a sculpture garden there and they fixed up the old house to use in a movie.  I think perhaps I liked it better empty.  I would like some of those old bottles though <smile>.  I think that youth went with the old camper, our version of the tent, and all its memories.