small gardens & small government

  It's 5 in the morning, I'm just back from dropping Deb off at the airport where she'll (hopefully) be able to fly out to visit with her sister Karen. Karen's prognosis is still quite bad, and while the weather is minus something with snow, Deb is as dutiful a sister as she is a wonderful wife. Karen and I are both lucky to have her in our lives.  With Deb off the music is on despite the hour. There could be no more appropriate song for the season than Colorado Christmas by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The visual quality, if you watch, is poor but I consider it more a song of the mind. For me much of it's appeal are memories of a Colorado that is harder and harder to find. Some of the memories are just personal ones, little to do with Christmas. One memory was a small herd of elk coming out of the morning fog from the spring below our cabin. It was fall not Christmas as the bull elk chased off younger rivals and guided his ladies up to and then past our cabin windo...

 We live in the blink of an eye for a universe they say is 13 billion years old. It's two in the morning and I could sleep but before I do I'd like to write this. Then I'll do what is next, sleep.  It was a couple of nights ago, the wind was fierce my side and back were aching and sleep was not an option it, was a prayer. We get these fierce winds in Colorado and I've never been comfortable with them. I'll lay awake as the wind howls waiting for a branch to smash through the window or the roof to fly off like one of those surreal video clips you see on the news. For a person who likes a good apocalypse story you'd think this would be just a sleep through event. Perhaps it bothers me that I might die in such a pedantic way. No vainglorious tragedy of the ages told and retold for generations. Just a branch through the eye from the maple tree falling on the house. The news would barely cover it as more than a lead-in to the weather. "How 'bout that wind ...