Summer Friends - Winter Friends

Well for goodness sakes - I downloaded these pictures over a week ago and now it is a week later.

For the past few week I have thought about this blog and each day fully intended to write some wonderful, creative words to go with these pictures, and every day there has been no energy for either wonderful or creative.

It feels as though this town is quietly imploding in on itself.

Or rather, the people in this town are imploding in on themselves.

We have finally concluded our commitment to the elderly widow that I wrote about a few times.

Everyone in town has known this lady much longer than LC and I have, everyone promised to help her move.

Everyone bailed on her.

There are many things we would have rather spent the last five months doing.

She had a general contractor for a husband.

She had three garage bays filled with power and hand tools.

At over 2500 square feet, this woman had the largest house in town.

She wanted to sell almost everything and significantly downsize to an apartment size amount of stuff.

A house to sell.  A truck to sell.  A lifetimes' worth of home and work gear to sell.

When we first offered to help this woman we made the assumption that those she has known for longer in town would help, but when it quickly became obvious that no-one would, we could not leave this woman to fend for herself.

She is 5 feet tall and 76 years old.

A tiny little spitfire of an old lady.

With no family living close by, she was on her own.

And now she is done.  And we are done.  House is sold, truck is sold, tools are sold, household belongings are sold, and this old lady has moved in with a lady she knows in Blackfoot.

At least through the winter.

Until she decides where she wants to be as she begins her new life.

It's been a long and tough year for someone that we like very much, and we hope that her new life is a good life..............

The rest of the undependables, the broken-promise-makers, the substance abusers, the unhappily married, and those needing of favors or drama or a shoulder to cry on or simple look-at-me attention, can stop now.

We are done helping anyone else.  Everyone else.  

And I have told them that as they have called me. 

Can you............no we can't.

Do you............no we don't.

Will you..............no we won't.

No lame excuses.  

Just a straight up no.  

We've helped everyone this summer and now we're done for a while.

We have camping to do and a new business to continue growing.

We have our own lives, our own problems, our own baggage.

We need to be alone.  We came here to be alone

We will be alone.
Enough already................. 

I have no idea when I took these pictures.

Sometime over the past month when the weather was still warm and summer still presided over the desert...........

I may not remember exactly when I took all these pictures, but I DO remember walking with Kory on the evening when the sky looked like this.

The skies that we see from our isolated little piece of the planet are one of my favorite things about living here.

There are some days when the sky almost feels as though it is alive.  It wanders.  It stretches.  It reaches across the desert in bands (sometimes in vivid sunset-colors and other times like this one in white bands against an evening blue sky).

Skies like this speak to me.

And I love the combination of the white bands, blue sky, and black landscape as the sun completes its decent in the west......................

Click on the picture above and it will enlarge.
Deer watching us closely and the mountains to our north have disappeared in the smoke of the wild fires............

We had a huge number of rabbits in town and out on BLM land this past summer - much more than the two previous summers we have spent in Atomic City - and my dog has had an outstanding time chasing the heck out of them.

We have watched her run after jacket rabbits on BLM land.  

Watching as she speeds through the sage brush and across open grass land, all the while yelping in excitement.  

Watching as she disappeared over rises.  

Catching site of her occasionally as we realized that she had run hard and fast and was now a couple of miles away. 

Blowing whistles and calling her name, so that she could find her way back to us.

She did catch a number out on BLM land.  And a number in our yard.  

It didn't end well for the bunnies.

But most of the time they outran her, or outmaneuvered her and she came back to us empty handed.

She did not seem to care either way quite honestly.

It was the chase that she loved so much.

Always the chase.

Just another reason to run, although she never really needs a reason.

Our dog has had a wonderful time chasing bunnies - all day, every day, throughout the entire summer.

In these pictures she was convinced that something was hiding from her inside these metal poles..................

Pictures taken around sunset during a time when we were still surrounded in all western states with wild fires.................

A month or so ago we made a quick out-and-back trip to Mackay to drop off a truck load of cases of water.

Folks in the valley were collecting food and water at the time (and later furniture and other house hold goods) for the hundreds of families who had lost so much in northern Idaho wild fires.

On the way up the valley we stopped briefly.

The area was covered in smoke, but it was still wonderful to be surrounded by green and mountains, if only for a brief time...................

My old grandmother always used to say, Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever.............George R.R. Martin