Blessings In The Desert

The world is quiet.

As I write this I can hear Kory snoring from the hallway, and stuffed cats and koalas and rubber boats and tennis balls are strewn all up and down that space.

As I write this I can see LC (with camo ball cap over his eyes) curled up and napping under a blanket on the love seat.

After walking my dog this morning, LC and I spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon oiling and sanding metal, and sanding and staining wood in the garage.

We have a huge wood stove in the living room and another one in the garage, and with both of them burning warmly this morning (after a freezing cold night that left an inch of snow covering the ground), LC and I found ourselves unexpectedly caught up in dirty but enjoyable garage-puttering.

A few days ago we drove down a gravel road just on the outskirts of town to a piece of private property that is strewn with piles and piles of.........junk.

Only its not really junk.  

OK..........some of it is junk.

We needed wood for a table saw table that LC wants to build.  We found much.

And we also dug around and unexpectedly found some other extremely interesting things.

An old rusty watering can.

A rusted rock hammer without a handle.

An old pulley.

Old boards holding rusty horse shoes.

Half a bucket full of other rusty old metal things that mean nothing to me, but which LC got very excited about.

And bricks.  More bricks.

Late last fall we found a big stack of kiln fired bricks in varying and beautiful shades of brown and red and yellow.  We had been told by the land owner (who wants to begin clearing up that land) that we were welcome to anything that we could find and use.

In that knowledge we picked up every brick in the pile and stacked them all against the side of our storage building, in anticipation of using them as the floor for an outdoor patio.

A few days ago we unexpectedly found more.  LOTS more.  

After stacking them in the truck and gingerly driving gravel road home, we stacked them in even higher piles outside against the back of our wood shed.

There's still more out there and it is supposed to rain and snow for the next few days, but as soon as the weather breaks again we will get the rest.

Our outdoor patio just got much larger.  Very cool................

A couple of nights ago I walked with Kory in back of town.

It was late in the day - a little later than we normally head out - and the sunset that was first developing and then developed was beautiful.

The endless world in front of me was completely silent, and as I first looked at the pink sky to the west and then the purple mountains to the north, I was glad to be living in this place.

Both LC and I are missing trees and water and by this weekend, when the snow and ice settles down a bit we will go in search of both.

But on this late day the world was calm and warm and enveloped in one of a number of sunny and mild days that we have been lucky enough to see recently................

I kept Kory on leash since it was so late in the day and darkness was impending but (as always) she didn't seem to mind.

We wandered along a fence line, occasionally veering into the sage brush as I let Kory set both the pace and the direction we traveled.

As I watched my dog happily and easily engaging in all the explorations that young and energetic dogs typically engage in,  I looked over towards Cedar and Big Buttes, watching the sky constantly shifting and changing as though it were some wild animal stretching after having lazily slept all afternoon.

Cedar Butte looks as though it is right beside Big Butte, but these are actually 10 miles apart.

You would never guess that looking at these pictures.

Such is the deceptive distances in a wide open, empty desert in the Snake River Plain...........

With the usual pinks and blues decorating the sky to the east, and with very little daylight remaining, Kory and I wandered off BLM land, jumped the ditch and picked up one gravel road after another as we slowly meandered our way back towards home.

The deer were all resting in the middle of a wide open field in town................

I love these two rusty, dented, beat up things, which are absolute treasures to me.

Found in the junk pile, the old oil can (that I initially thought was a watering can) and old pulley will go either in the sun-room (when it is built) or on a shelf in the outdoor patio (when it is built).................

A couple of pictures of LC's garage.

Still a work in progress, as so many others things are around this joint.............

A few of the other rusty things we have found in the pile.

Much of this stuff is completely foreign to me, but LC gets excited telling me all about them, and I at the same time feign interest in his answer and enjoy his enthusiasm................

A rock hammer head that I have started cleaning up................

Oh boy, we're hurriedly becoming desert rats.

A few weeks ago we were over at the piles digging for a couple of specific sizes of lumber.  Unexpectedly I found this thing half buried in the dirt.

LC told me that it was an old drain cover, but as I stood in the leftover snow studying this rusty, dirty thing all I saw was a candle holder.

After some cleaning, sanding and and oiling, it has indeed found new life as a candle holder, and it now sits on a table in the living room.............

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

Anne Lamott

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/annelamott462101.html#YIQb6piPK2JMltQ0.99

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert.  You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise.  The sky is your ocean and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music or Neil Young................Anne Lamott

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

Anne Lamott

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/annelamott462101.html#YIQb6piPK2JMltQ0.99