The steroids I started in on Saturday are beginning to loosen things up, and I know i should be using this strength and flexibility to do some work on getting the flooring down upstairs so I can move my bed back into that room. Obviously, if I'm still sitting here writing instead of going upstairs and getting to it, I'm not making any progress.
Sometime when I reach a stopping point I raise my head and gaze out the window as a way of refocusing my attention for a while. It's different out there today and for the last few days, in regard to the final leaves falling off the deciduous trees just outside. It's rained for the past two days, and when I looked outside and saw the leaves falling, I concluded that it was because they had gotten wet from the rain, and the added weight of the water was the final straw for the autumn leaves act.
Today, however, with the warm front gone with the rain, and the sky brilliantly blue again, the leaves are still falling, and I think it's because of the high winds bringing in the cold front. In any case, the tree skeletons will be imminently visible again, and the vegetation brown-out will be complete. I can easily see the pond down the slope through the underbrush I chopped out last year.
It is psychologically comforting to me to be able to see the light reflected off the pond surface all year long. The sun sets behind some part of it all four seasons. During the summer the sun sets over the pond, but there is some woods that stop the pond from reflecting the final stages where the colors get vivid. Presently the sun sets far enough south that the final fading light of sunset on the clear nights bounces off the pond directly through the windows I'm looking out of.
If there is anything I miss about working it's the sights I'd see to and from work all through the year. One of my favorite areas to have this happen was my first job as a welder at the big shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It's located, naturally, at the mouth of the Pascagoula River, and in miniature, just like Biloxi River west of it just down the road, and Mobile River east of it just down the road, the Pascagoula River had carved out a bay for itself where it entered the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike those adjoining rivers, the bay of the Pascagoula River was pretty much filled up with sand, and negotiating it by boat was haphazardous.
To return to how I like to watch how the seasons and the weather they bring act on an artifact of nature, driving back and forth across the long part of Pascagoula bay and the bridges was just wonderful. Sometimes it would still be dark when I went to work, and still have plenty of light on the drive back home. Other times it would be light on the way to work and I would drive home in darkness. The equinox seasons were more evenly divided between night and day. There was fog to content with that might be wispy on the land side, but when the bridge that took you out into the openness of Pascagoula Bay it was like hitting a tidal wave that covered everything up, and I could only see the tail lights of the closest cars to me.
The bird life in this area and the variety of it throughout the year was such that it couldn't be ignored even by the most jaded traveler. I don't think it could compete with the huge flyway up and down the Texas gulf coast, but there was still a huge variety of birds to see just driving back and forth to work.
I never thought to buy a bird identification book during that era of my life. I was too used to having to carry everything I owned with my body like some pack mule, and a bird identification book would have been just so much baggage I'd tote around if I was a stupid lout. My youngest brother had no such phobias ruling his life, and when we worked together in Galveston, Texas, he bought one of those books right away. We almost come to blows reaching for it. I was so intrigued by identifying the crazy number of different kinds of birds there, I vowed to never be without a bird book again. I'm gonna buy one soon. It won't be long. You just wait...
I could move to the coastal plains of East Texas and feel right at home with the physical layout. I'd miss the trees. The trees they cut in East Texas to build the houses in the old West didn't come back like they do here because of the lack of yearly rainfall. They depend on tropical storms and hurricanes for their water supply even more critically than here.
If there were one single factor that would move me to the coastal plains of Texas it would be the activity of the bird life up and down that flyway. They probably carry some weird freaking bird flu from South America and back. In that way they're a little like the brightly-colored butterflies and exotic frogs. The more attractive and startling their color patterns, the more deadly their poison. I haven't thought about that part of working in Texas in a long time. There are worse things I could waste my time with than looking at birds.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
