Heads-up

I believe I’ll take Thanksgiving off.

I’ve dropped a blog post the last 54 days in a row, so WordPress tells me. It’d be worthwhile, I think, to reserve Thanksgiving Day for myself — I won’t report on it and I won’t photograph it.

This I’ll do for me.

Everything’s fine. Life is good — hell, it’s better than good. I’m just givin’ y’all a heads-up.

After returning from a quick run to Flippin early Sunday morning, I intended to dig into the regular ritual of exercising my generators and two-stroke power tools. That didn’t happen right away.

First, I got sidetracked playing with Smudge, who had an unusual amount of herding-dog energy to burn off. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from a high-school classmate and childhood neighbor — he was driving from Ohio to West Virginia to hunt and just wanted to catch up.

We talked for over an hour. Great conversation.

Incidentally, he said he’d hunted in northwest Montana in October. Turns out he was up the North Fork of the Flathead, stopped at Polebridge Mercantile and had a huckleberry bear claw. What are the odds?

I took care of the generators before the end of the day. My Husqvarna chainsaw, too, which started on the fourth pull and ran well.

*(Kansas City Journal, November 22, 1899)*

I ‘ve been living on The Mountain since June 27th, 2023 — almost 29 months now. Before that, going back four years, I traveled to and from once or twice a week. You’d think that by this time it’d feel common, perhaps even ordinary.

Not by a long shot.

Every day is new. Every day that I have the good fortune to wake up, breathe and move is a gift I refuse to squander.

A trip to town need not be drudgery. It’s another opportunity to be fully present in my own life. All I have to do is choose it.

This (pictured, below) is what my choice looked like Sunday morning.