Evening Walk By The Lake

These pictures were taken.........when?.............sometime in mid October I think.

There were still leaves on the trees but the wind was rapidly carrying them away.

Not long after these pictures were taken the trees were all bare............

There are so many things that I love about where we live, but what excites and pleases me the most is that we are only five minutes from the lake.

We are so used to BLM land.  

Sage brush.  Rocky hillsides.  Gnarly and twisted cedar trees.  Steep dirt embankments.  No water.

So used to it while living in Idaho and so used to it while living in Wyoming, that the sheer joy of living so close to the Buffalo Bill Reservoir has not even begun to wear off yet.

At this stage I cannot ever imagine it wearing off.

LC can fish.  I can kayak.  Kory can swim and splash and drink.   We can all relish in the site of water and mountains and hard wood trees..............

On this day I walked alone with Kory.

Armed as always against the unlikely (but always present) possibility of running into a bear.

Or a human intent on doing harm.

It was a cold, windy and partly sunny day, and the promise of the impending winter was in the air.

I had closed the store at the end of the day, rushed home to meet my dog, and then rushed down to the lake, all the while knowing that the days were getting shorter and our time wandering by the lake after hours was finite.

Soon the time change would happen.

And it would be cold and dark and instead of wandering by the lake, I would already be wandering around the house in my PJs at 6 o'clock.

We were living on borrowed time by mid-October and so I consciously embraced the cold and the wind, and enjoyed the evening with my dog...............

All of this was under water just a couple of months ago.

Now it is rocky beach front for us to wander..................

The behemoth known as Carter Mountain dominates the South Fork landscape..................

All summer we have been patiently waiting for the time when we would have this place to ourselves.

We finally do..................

We have now had this girl for five years.

Five years ago on Nov 6 we drove to Boise to pick up a dog that we had never met.

I was still grieving over the loss of Jamie (our previous dog) and was not ready for another.  But LC wanted her and so we accepted her.

Bringing an unknown being into our home and hoping for the best.

Kory quickly became a beloved member of our family.

She has an increasingly white muzzle these days, which she did not have five years ago.

But she still runs, climbs and jumps like the healthy, athletic dog we met for the first time five years ago..................

Multiple piles of driftwood had been gathered on the beach, and when we first found them in mid-October we assumed that they would quickly be burned or put into a chipper or..........something.

As of this writing there are still almost 20 of this huge piles dotting the rocky beach down by the lake.....................

It was a gorgeous night.

Cold and still and gorgeous.

I was bundled against the cold and relished both the silence and the sight of my beautiful dog as she ran and played by the water.

The sun was setting.  It was time to head back to the Suburban and go home.................

It was a late-October Sunday, the leaves tinged with brown, and the air crisp in a way that made you shiver if you stood still too long - Joe Kita, Growing Old and Staying Young..................