Losing Friends

One of the shocking side effects that comes with living into a fourth quarter century of your life is losing friends... Did I pay close enough attention to our last few conversations? ...Was I really listening to words and body language?... Was there a plea for help? In your seventies you don't lose friends due to contrary political perspectives, even if you disagree. You don't lose friends because they stood you up on planned adventures. You realize people are going through a lot of different complications...one day good, one day not so good. We have learned to forgive often and repeatedly. I've had some of the same friends for fifty or more years. We don't see the world through the same or similar sets of eyes. We react to what life throws at us in a multitude of different ways. But, we still consider each other as friends. When one of us expires, we all grieve...and say, "Damn, was I really present during that entire friendship?"

Rooted

"Are you leaving the area after you sell your commercial property?", everyone asks. We moved to Chester intentionally in 1985 after a couple of years of talking about a move to higher country, specifically Chester, California. We were married in Greenville and had our reception in Chester in 1983. For me, I missed living in a region that held four distinct seasons each and every year. Low elevation California was boring me. Forty years later, here I am still at 4,600ft. where the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges merge. We built our 1,600ft. cabin in 1991, it's been perfect and we've kept up the maintenance like pros. We love our community, we trust our neighbors and when we adventure off to corners of the hemisphere everyone keeps an eye on our place. We invested fifteen years into Jet-Set vacationing..Europe, Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawaii and then Europe again, again and again. Burning jet fuel, one of the most environmentally impactful decadences you can foist on your fellow Earthlings. Now, we keep it on the ground and enjoy cleaner air. We are travellers and we're still burning petrol... however, we are more than happy to keep it on the ground...earthbound.

Routinely...

I rise between 5:45 and 6:15am on most days...I find Birkenstocks or Crocs for my stair descent...fourteen of them to the Great Room, where I probably left my pants. Into the kitchen and straight to the coffee pot. I grind my own and get water out of the tap, it's fantastic water...only tainted for one week (after the one million acre Dixie Fire) out of the forty years we've lived in this watershed. While the coffee is brewing I sit down with my Ipad and a cup of yogurt. I look for stories about geologic events, re-wilding, environmental challenges, people surviving cancer and last of all, worldwide political unrest. I struggle to stay out of the Donald Trump 'rabbit hole'. The man loves attention and I'd rather not give it to him. I check facebook to see if my people are OK and then pull on socks and shoes for a hike in the woods outback with my pup. This is how my day starts outdoors, a one or two mile hike with a Black Diamond hiking stick and my Labrador. A small window onto my daily routine.