The introverted thinker breaks the rules

My earliest memory is taste and proprioception.

I am outside in the yard. I am under three, because it is when we still lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. I am standing. I am not terribly steady and I am holding on to the pipe. I remember how the pipe feels, metal and a bit rusty and rough. The day is hot, but the metal is cool on my hands. I am drinking the water out of the top of a pipe that sticks up from the ground. Water pools in the top and I like it. It tastes of iron. I am not supposed to drink that water.

I lose my balance a little and bump hard against the pipe. My tooth breaks. Now my mouth tastes of blood and iron.

I don’t remember it hurting much and I am not scared. I am mostly annoyed and resigned. I think, I am going to get caught now, I can’t hide this.

This is me in the canoe and my parents, in the early 1960s. I don’t know who took the photograph.

sky door

I am submitting this to Thursday doors today. It’s not a door really, except sometimes the views traveling or hiking or outdoors are doors into another consciousness… I think that hiking helps me through the door into feeling peaceful and that my problems or worries or hurt feelings are not really significant after all. They are small in this beautiful world. They shrink and seem insignificant.

I took this near the summit of Mount Townsend, looking back. There is Mount Ranier and then we had a discussion about the other peak to the right. Mount Adams, I think, because Mount St. Helen’s is not as tall….

 

growth

This is for photrablogger’s Mundane Monday #116. Ok, yeah, it’s Thursday. I am thrown off by four days off, my son visiting all the way from Maryland and the news of the death of an old friend, Monday.

The lower branches of the trees are dead, but are covered with growth anyhow: the hanging beautiful moss. I don’t know how the moss holds on through the dry season. Meanwhile the tree continues upwards, new branches reaching up to the light.

I took this on Mount Zion, two weeks ago.

Lake Street Dive: What I’m doing here.