. Spinning .

Incredibly beautiful Sunday day. Summer still, yet autumn air is circling. Green grass wonders when it can finally go to sleep, and leaves hold on with dry-hand grips to branches they have loved in a summer fling. Flowers shake their heads deciding if they have the time for just one more spurt of blooms, and peppers laugh with time till they turn red.

My apologies to Mr. Trump.

I have lost much dear to me this year, but am also grateful for the almost-tragedies that weren’t. A dear friend of ours is going in for bypass surgery bright and early Monday morning, and this I am pre-counting as a blessing that he’s having it done before it went too far. He needs us now, he lost his wife, our dear friend, just three months ago.

What has me thinking in this somber vein again is the cutting of a tree, an ash that stood proudly to a height of 70 feet or more. It graced the front of my next door neighbor’s yard, and shaded me daily in my shop. It looks so barren there without it, and I deeply feel its loss. And then I think, of other things this neighbor’s home has lost in fifteen years that I’d cared deeply for and cried along with her. Two cats that oversaw the vole population; two labrador retrievers that I played with and “aunted” when their family took vacations; a horse named Bandit that we fed with treats of cabbage leaves and carrots from our garden; a good and honest man.

Life is losing things and people along the way. It’s also gaining all of them and more. Without the memories that are so precious and with luck, cannot be lost at all, it would not be worth the price.

Every item tells a story, a different story every day. SUN – MON – TUES…all the way through Saturday. We tell our time through daily pills, through cases throughout our lives. Today I brush my teeth and empty pills from the next full space. But…what? It’s FRI today, and THURS pills are in my hand. Wondering if I lost myself in space somehow for one whole revolution of the earth. Or did I brush my teeth the day before?

No worry, really; they’re only vitamins and save your skin from sagging and put color in your cheeks. But I remember long ago, a single pill in daily rows, S-M-T-W-T-F-S, and then again, again, and one more time. These were pills that caused a lot more worry if one were missed. These were pills for youth and love and planning for the future.

I’ve opened pills for elderly, and set them out and checked them. SUN – TUES….halves and colors every other day. This too, is cause for worry. Or it used to be.

Who would have thought the morning sky could lie?

Cirrus cloud feathers track slowly across the blueness of unending space. Odd angles though, in streams not blowing with their brothers. The mark of man, above his earth, has reached far within, without, allotted space with jet trails mimicking the work of God or Mother Nature.