weekend report
We headed down to Moab for the weekend, celebrating my oldest friend’s birthday there for the fourth year in a row. I’ve moved from wanting to see arches (although they’re always cool) to wanting to go find rock art, and my other friend’s knowledge of the area didn’t disappoint. We saw petroglyphs AND pictographs!
If you can get to the desert in the early spring, do it. (Stay here and eat here.) If you can bring your favorite people along, even better.
Hiking With Poems
Passage
by John Brehm
In all the woods that day I was
the only living thing
fretful, exhausted, or unsure.
Giant fir and spruce and cedar trees
that had stood their ground
three hundred years
stretched in sunlight calmly
unimpressed by whatever
it was that held me
hunched and tense above the stream,
biting my nails, calculating all
my impossibilities.
Nor did the water pause
to reflect or enter into
my considerations.
It found its way
over and around a crowd
of rocks in easy flourishes,
in laughing evasions and
shifts in direction.
Nothing could slow it down for long.
It even made a little song
out of all the things
that got in its way,
a music against the hard edges
of whatever might interrupt its going.
Weekend With Toby
I had four days off and I had a furry shadow for most of it. Here he is unconvinced Doc’s new desk is being assembled properly:
Here he is helping me finish my quilted jacket:
Here he is taking a break from helping me so much:
And here’s where we sneaked off to while he was asleep (things are melting!):