We had our first real rain of the season, and according to our little
rain gauge it was almost an inch. That's significant rain for our neck
of the woods in early October. We were so happy about it, Roger turned
off the irrigation drip timer to our little garden. That rain will take
care of things for several days.
The
best part of the rainy season besides all that wonderful rain water is
the stunning array of clouds that are ever-changing across the sky. They
move in from the west and change the light and shadows in every
direction. And then the sun comes out for an hour and everyone who has
been waiting, goes for a nice long walk.
So, when the
skies were blue and clear to the west, we headed out for our
neighborhood 2.5 mile walk. We got to the very first corner and ran into
our wonderful neighbors who were walking home. We had a nice five
minute chat about the weather, Roger's finger (which is really starting
to heal), and my mother's ring which needs a little repair. Then we
waved goodbye and kept on walking. That was the first conversation.
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Roger and the mirage in August 2016 |
We walked down the road heading north. There are cow
pastures on the west side of the road and the very edge of small town
suburbia on the east. It's the road we take when we want to photograph
Roger in a mirage because we can see long and far. Here we walked past
the church and the charter school, and then turned the corner heading
east. That's when we heard it. BOOM! An explosion. We both turned and
looked back toward the church and caught the sight of a flash of light
and a crazy puff of orange smoke that looked to be coming off a
high-tension wire transformer. We had read about another
explosion in town just the other day that had been caused by a mylar balloon. We
were rather shocked by the sound and sight of this and kept on walking.
We were glad that we had run into our neighbors because if we hadn't we would have been
much closer to the wires that had sparked wildly and loudly.
We
turned the corner and headed south. That's when a jogger came running
by. She was heading in the same direction as we were. She took off her
ear-buds and said, "Did you guys hear that explosion?" We told we had.
Then of course we talked about how weird it was to hear such a thing.
And she saw the orange puff of smoke as well. It was good to confer with
someone and have a reality check like this. She put her ear-buds back in
and waved good bye.
We kept on walking and stopped to
say hello as we always do to the little pigs that are in a fenced off part of a larger
cow pasture. That's when we met a man walking his beautiful old black
lab. He told us that he had come upon these pigs just the other evening
and that they were all sleeping in a row lined up by size from the
smallest to the largest. There must be thirty pigs in that pen, and he
said it was the cutest thing to see. He also told us that the pigs have
gotten used to people coming by who feed them, and it makes them a bit
ornery with each other to get closer to the humans. Then we asked him if
he heard the explosion. He said he had, and then he shared that his
house was without power for 24 hours because of the transformer
explosion that had occurred on Friday. We agreed that it seemed very
strange for there to be two explosions like this. Then, we bid him good
day, and moved on.
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Pileus Velum |
We were now back in the small town suburban part of
town. It was quiet there. It was likely that no one had heard that explosion
that was a mile away. (We didn't hear the explosion Friday that was a
bit more than a mile from our house.) An older man was walking to his
car parked in his driveway and noticed us walking by. I noticed his mother watching him from the window, as he talked to us. He said with an accent that we could
not identify, "My mother she loves the rain. She loves the rain we had
today. She loves what it does for the garden." We agreed. Nothing is
quite like rain for keeping a garden healthy and green. We've walked
past their garden many times. They grow lots and lots of fava beans. The
man said, "I like the sun, like right now, this sun how beautiful this
all is." He spread his arms out and looked at the sky. We agreed, we
told him we like the sun too. It's why we were out for a this walk. Then
he looked at us so warmly and said, "Namaste." I smiled and put my
hands together. We walked on.
When we got home we saw
that the house had lost power briefly. All the clocks were blinking
blinking blinking with the wrong time. It was a very brief outage and a
very interesting outing.