Running on Sunday

It is a most inviting road, hills and all. I really love running it early on Sunday mornings. On this morning, no cars pass us at all. We're all done by the time church traffic starts up.

We run past the pond where Fergus the bird-eating bullfrog met his personal grim reaper, a great blue heron.  

Field daisies are making constellations, Milky Ways of flowers.

I do love the tonsured look of this hill, half hayfield and half pine plantation.

Cattle turn to stare. 

The hay is high, and needs cut. Yes, that’s what they say around here. I’m starting to like it, that dropped infinitive. Very occasionally one will even issue from my lips. I already use “holler” for “hollow” and “run” for “creek” and don’t even think about it. The place is leaving its stamp on me.

Liam waits for me at the corner, stretching his long boylegs to pass the time. My boys have no trouble outdistancing me.

 He turns back, and I go on toward my abandoned farmstead, my musing place, to the barns who are my muses.

The big sky on this route thrills me every time.

 Chet and I continue on up the steep hill to the next farmstead. I see the same red maple branch I photographed last September, as its leaves were just blazing to orange. Oh. Hold that thought. I love autumn most of all, but this spring, ohh this spring. Let me live every day of it, seeing and smelling it all.

So says Chet Baker. He smells the meadow, the trails of the voles and rabbits.

 

Something about the way my iPhone camera handles landscapes lends a surreal edge. Planned or not, I'll take it. And I now understand why Tim Ryan shoots and shoots with the camera I had the audacity to make fun of. It's a camera, all right, and perhaps its greatest virtue is that it's always with you.

Making these images helps me appreciate the beauty all around. Capturing them and sharing them somehow lends a grandeur to the landscape that I am never tempted to take for granted. It's good.