Last bone

Pour yourself an extra large measure of scotch.  Get the bone from the fridge, it’s in a vacuum pack.  Find the scissors and cut it open.  The bone, a fine leg bone from a lamb who didn’t realize his or her sacrifice was for another creature not so different from themselves, is a bit bloody.  Perfect for the dog.

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Happy anniversary

I started this blog one year ago this week.  My first post was about an overnight stay in a small city in France.  I’ve been asked several times why I write and post my thoughts online; for some it’s a kind of arrogance, for others its been viewed as a violation of privacy, while still others are just puzzled by the seeming contradiction of it.  I am radically open but in a quiet way – there’s no effort on my part to increase web traffic other than occasional requests of readers to forward on the link – which is strange.  I’m not jumping up and down, calling attention to myself, but I am talking publicly about deeply personal things, or at least, things which are deeply personal to me.

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Laid back

In North America, there are really only four major geological areas, and I’ve lived in all four (yes, there’s a lot of diversity below that level, but bear with me).  There’s the mountains of the western side of the continent, and while I’ve not lived in the actual mountains, I’ve spent most of my adult life on the western shore, in cities on the Pacific rim, San Francisco and Seattle.  I grew up in Maine, which is very close in its geology and its weather and its culture to the vast Canadian shield region of the north, granite and basalt two billion years old peaking through the biomass that covers it, swamp lakes and bogs and mosquitoes and winter winds shooting down from the Arctic. There’s the eastern mountains and their low, rolling moraine hills, spreading out to include New York, and while I’ve spent less time there it’s mostly by design that I’ve avoided it.  And then there are the plains, sweeping down from the western mountains and south of the low divide between the rivers that run north and the rivers that run south to the Gulf of Mexico, the climate shifting from deep cold and mild summers in the Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba prairies, to the deep cold and scorching summers of the high plains of Montana and the Dakotas, to the mild winters and soul-sucking heat of Texas and Oklahoma and northern Mexico.   Continue reading “Laid back”