Category: Recently Observed
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Big Rock | Mansfield, WA | September 2019 “What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can’t move, with no hope of rescue? Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to…
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Chalk Hills | Leahy Junction, WA | September 2019 Geologists appear restrained, but their writings on the Chalk Hills have a “hot diggity!” feel about them. The Hills’ blazing white pyramids and stepped ridges are the eroded sediments of a glacial lake from 10,000 years ago. They’ve been exposed in the last millennia by wind,…
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Child’s Grave | Mold, WA | August 2019 Cemetery Visit #3 | Statuettes of lambs, signifying purity and innocence, have marked children’s graves since the Civil War. Sadly, the Lamb of God peeks all too frequently above the wind-blown grasses of the Mold Cemetery. On a recent visit, I thought I heard children’s laughter riding…
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Angel | Mold, WA | August 2019 Cemetery Visit #2 | A co-worker who spent most nights hunting raccoons pulled me aside one afternoon to confess he saw angels. “You find ‘em glowing in the trees,” he said. “Like fireflies, but bigger.” On a hunt the night before, one persistent angel clung to him through…
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Gravesite | Mold, WA | August 2019 Cemetery Visit #1 | My mother’s zest for living made her a perfect candidate for afterlife communication. Her all-embracing love, with a heavy dose of humor, seemed too big, too exuberant, too energized to disappear due to the mere technicality of death. We siblings figured her spirit would…
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Sliver of Moon | Twisp, WA | August 2019 “God is the friend of silence,” said Mother Teresa. “See how trees, flowers, grass grow in silence? See the stars, the moon and the sun, how they
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Pear on Stone | East Wenatchee, WA | August 2019 A skyscraper stuns in design and complexity, but so does a garden gazebo. A 20-ingredient stew bursts with flavor, but so does trout sautéed in butter. Jackson Pollock’s complex art mesmerizes, but so does a Chinese painting of one blade of grass. An object’s shape…
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Drive In | Coulee City, WA | July 2019 There are travelers, I’ve heard, who zip past roadside eateries even though hunger has hitched a ride. In my family, those first faint cravings trigger the search for jalapeño corn dogs and teriyaki chicken wings. In fact, hunger governs the brake pedal, so we slow at…
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Vintage Outhouse | Twisp, WA | July 2019 Edward Abbey (d. 1989), desert denizen and author who helped inspire the environmental movement, laced his in-your-face defense of Mother Nature with humorous observations. In “Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness,” his account of serving as a ranger at Arches National Park, he noted a placard…
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