In Mountain and Meadow - Life

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I like to impress my daughters that their Dad is doing just fine, so I have been trying to do a better job cleaning up my house This is not an easy thing for me. All my hobbies and activities put keeping a model-home type clean house down near the bottom of my to do list (last).

But lately I have been working seriously on shaping up the place. This first involves rearranging the basement so more of my books can go down there. That will get a lot of the upstairs uncluttered.

I am embarrassed to say when I started this project. So I won't.

Which brings me to last week, when I again had to make a decision to make on how I would spend my late season vacation. To do anything other than staying at home and keep cleaning would confirm me as being a lazy procastinator.

I thought about my plan of action real hard, and after careful analysis I came up with two points:

1. I am not expecting any visitors in the foreseeable future.

2. The condition of my house in the short term only matters to me and Ben and Maggie (my border collies).

Those two are pretty forgiving house companions. As long as I take them on walks, throw the frisbee for them in the backyard, and feed them on time, everything else is ok. As it is with me.

You can probably tell where this was headed. (deja vu). But then something else happened which signed the deal. As I was reading 'The Art of the Possible' by A. Stoddard, I came across this quote:

"A warm heart is more important than a clean house."

That was all I needed.

Saturday found me and Ben and Maggie headed over the Continental Divide, on the way to Ridgway Colorado by way of Grand Junction and a night in the BookCliffs. I knew my heart was going to be darn sure warmed by once again seeing those Colorado Aspen in their fall colors, beneath the snow-covered San Juan Mountains.

Well the Aspens were at their peak, just as I had imagined. The San Juans had been dumped on by an early snowfall the week before, making for a awful pretty landscape of yellow and white.

I had a few surprises, like the middle of the night thunderstorm that rolled in. It was so perfectly quiet; then the dark was broken hard by a flash of light that brightened the whole mountain range, followed by a tremendous boom a few seconds later. More than once the thunder was so powerful I could feel it shaking the mountain beneath me.

After the lightning and thunder rolled down the valley to the north and east, I once again picked up the sound of a distant elk bugle, among the rustling of the aspen leaves overhead.

Then there was the pack of coyotes that yipped at the bottom of the hill. I whispered to Ben and Maggie what was out there: "coyotes.", just so they would know. (When you are around border collies enough you learn they are as intelligent as most people).

And there was the very fresh bear track in mud a few hundred yards from camp, which added some mystery to my stay.

Well my decision was the same one I have made before, and probably will again. I cannot help but turn to those things that have always warmed my heart, enriched my life. Give me cold clear mountain mornings, high trails to explore with my wild-hearted dogs, ferocious mountain storms on some nights, bright stars in a peaceful black sky on others, where I can lie and study the constellations, and that is enough. What more could a man want?

I drove home a few days later with two tired and happy dogs, asleep on the seat beside me. Like me, they were glad when we pulled up the drive to our house. It was good to be back to our beloved and comfortable home, no matter that it was not perfectly neat and spotless.

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