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Sexagesima Snow
If you look closely (or if you can enlarge it) at the photo above, you’ll see a black spot near the bottom, just to the right of the center of the frame. That’s a black bear. I saw him while Jinx and I were out on our walk this morning. The bear was several hundred yards away, loping away from us towards the south, but I knew that if Jinx spotted him, it would be Katy-bar-the-door and every-botty would be kung-fu fighting. I yelled and made silly noises to distract the spotted menace while trying to snap a few pics of the bear. This was the clearest of the ones…
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On The Feast of Stephen
The dogs allowed us to sleep late today –0700 — and after they had eaten and while the good Texas pecan coffee was brewing, I took Jinx for a walk. Not even a hundred yards into the ramble and I was wishing I’d worn sunglasses. The fresh-risen sun was slashing across the diamond-studded smooth white surface laying on the fields, and it hurt my eyes. All about me, though, was beauty of the pure shocking kind that only wintertime can produce. The snow lay all around, deep and crisp and even, and Jinx chased a cow that had somehow escaped her fenced pasture. My heart lifted as the sun lifted,…
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In Which S.K. Flinches
I’ve lived in the South most of my life, with a few periods of residency overseas and in other regions in the USA, so I’m used to the scarab beetles known as June bugs. But I’ve never understood why they’re called “June bugs,” when they almost never show up until the first week of July. Nor have I ever gotten used to how these things will fly straight at my head, with a volume 11 buzz that sounds like a plague, the kind of plague Apocalyptic John would have described as having been poured out of a phial onto the wicked nations of the earth. All this week, every time…