I always feel pleased after a delivery from our hay supplier, when the empty hay aisle is filled with sweet smelling green bales. We buy from a supplier who stacks the hay for us. The guys who delivered it this time were new and inclined to whimper when I insisted that ninety bales of hay had always fit before. The hay has be stacked carefully so we can still get through the doors in the back of the stalls to feed the horses.
For years I’ve been driving by the entrances to Fox Run Park, which is about five miles due east of where I live, thinking that I ought to check it out one day. I stopped this afternoon, and found a little gem of a park. In this photo, Pikes Peak is framed by trees across an expanse of ornamental water. Along the trail I walked, the trees have been thinned so that the woods seem spacious with very little understory. Since the main species is Ponderosa pine, there is a very faint smell of vanilla, unlike the strong pine scents of the forests I remember from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Sunday, while my mother was at Mass, I took a walk along Cottonwood Creek. This shot points to where I imagine Pikes Peak would be if it weren’t for the clouds.
Most of the zinnias that I planted didn’t survive, but the hardiest ones were over-achievers, with huge blooms that practically assault the eye.
I was out before dawn on an errand earlier this week, and was stopped at the bluffs by a passing train as I returned home. Fortunately, I had my camera.
Sunday morning I drove to the Rio Grande Nature Center. Even there, it is hard to forget that you are in the middle of a desert.
While I took this photo, some Canada geese flew in and out making a tremendous racket. Later, I saw a roadrunner. One of the watchers, a birder, lent me her field glasses so I could get a better look. I find them entrancing, probably due to an overexposure of Saturday morning cartoons as a child. Back then, I rooted for the bird, though now I have a sneaking sympathy for poor old Wile E. Coyote.