Saturday, December 19, 2009

mr. soul

I had coffee with some friends down in the city yesterday morning. I told them the story about how my wife and kids had given me this dog as a gift.

I told them how I'd taken him for a walk down along the lake that morning. And one of them said, "What lake?" He didn't know where I lived, so I had to explain.

Yes, I live by a lake in the middle of a highly unpopulated nowhere. The downside, I suppose, is that it takes a long time to get to the city. The upsides are pretty amazing, though.

Yesterday, for example, when I was walking the dog along the lake shore, the sun hadn't come up yet, so it was very quiet. When we got near the water, startled fish would jump away from the edge of the water, and we woke up a couple Great Blue Herons that make the most annoying squawk. Then, when we walked out onto the sand bar, we flushed this enormous hawk out of the brush. When I went around to where he came from, we saw that he'd just killed a duck and was eating it when we scared him away.

Later in the afternoon, I walked the dog back to the same spot, and all that was left of the duck was its head and green webbed feet.

That was cool.