Friday, August 30, 2013








The Summer Time Blues.....I can't wait much longer..

When you look out our window in the early morning light, looking down on the Oak covered ridge below, every thing is blue. It almost looks like a blue fog, but it is not. It is a heavy blue-grey smoke from the American and Rim forest fires burning for days now. You dare not take a deep breath outside! Little particulates can and will go into your lungs and may never leave. The down-slope air in the morning pushes the smoke down from the fires and when the valley below warms, maybe along with a Delta breeze, the smoke funnels right back up the canyons and over the Sierra. It strangles everything from Auburn on the west, to Reno on the east. What is a guy to do? Stay inside or plan your day to go where the smoke seems thinner? Couple that with the fact that it is August, and we have a case of the Summer Time Blues.

The grass is brown and crisp, the birds are sparse, the fish are down deep in the Sierra lakes and all the frogs have gone too. Where the frogs have gone, nobody knows. They think they all died from a world-wide fungus that is killing amphibians everywhere. Some of the deer are coming at night into our green pasture to feed, but are gone somewhere when the smoke comes. I want to go with them but don't know where to go?

I like every day I wake up breathing and feeling no pain. But now soon after I wake, I try not to breathe and my pain is a longing for that chill that's a coming, with the rain and the wind. And I long for the snow on that high ridge above. I want to breath that cold searing wind and chill-out my face. You see....we have the Summer Time Blues and I can't wait much longer.