Shared Waters

Some deer have just shown up for snacks. One of them looks a lot like Lily, but she's not as ribby- maybe younger. She's got a little fawn too. Today grapes are on the menu - overripe ones. These ladies love them. They're all gone now, but the Momma deer is still standing about 10 feet away, staring at me expectantly. And now she has huffed at me. Actually huffed in exasperation. I guess she wants another plum-feast like yesterday! We have a big plum tree in the fenced part of our yard. I collected all the bruised ones on the ground and threw them over to the deer. The fawn could barely fit the little yellow plums in her mouth. They just kept shooting out of her jaws, getting more and more slippery with each attempt. Finally, she'd get a hold of it between her grinders, and GOOSH! Juice and pulp everywhere! I think she got some in her ears, because her mom came over and gave them a good cleaning afterwards.

It seems weird, I guess, to be typing on a computer while I'm sitting outside in this beautiful calm scene, but the laptop is working much better for me than pen and paper these days. Feeling so good right now. I was given another day off, unexpectedly, and so I got to ride my bike again and swim again, and nap outside again. After dinner, tangled in the blackberry brambles, with my pajama bottoms tucked into my wooly socks against the skeetos, and garden clogs, and comfy sweater and still-pruney fingers and salt-wirey hair and skin stretched out from sun and smiling. It struck me, so simply, that I don't need much more than this. I really don't. Now I've got my Charlie cat sniffing around, and the deer are gone, and I just feel so whole and calm. Wouldn't I just love to buy a little parcel of land on an island - even a remote and inaccessible one - and build a home... I don't know how to build a home, but I'd love to do it all the same. Maybe a home with lots of different spaces, separate suites even, so I could live there with family or friends. Not be alone, but not be crowded. And all that space and all that quiet everywhere around me.

I read a book once that I loved called The Curve of Time. Thinking about it today. Want to re-read it cause the details are all lost. It was a biographical book about an amazing B.C. woman named M. Wylie Blanchet. It was 1925 or so when her husband died and left her with 5 young children. They didn't have much... but there was a boat. A boat just large enough for them all to sleep in, if they were stacked up on every surface. She'd learned enough from her husband about navigating in the ocean, so she up and took her kids out in this boat, for 4 or 5 months straight that summer. And then did it again every single year after that. Up and down the B.C. coast, exploring all the islands, all the inlets, and the totally untouched country. Just unbelievable, these stories. She's one of my personal heros.

Some great lines I came across today - Wordsworth remembering his younger self visiting his beloved countryside. Saying he was "...more like a man Flying from something that he dreads than one who sought the thing he loved. " I want to always be sure that wherever I am, it is from seeking and not hiding.

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