I love walking in the park and looking for the signs of the changing seasons.  Another year will too soon roll through here. I love the contrasts between what remains the same and what changes. Well nothing remains the same, but the patterns of the changes are steady enough to be predictable.

My granddaughter Avery is chalking up the milestones gaining inches and pounds as expected, first smile, first tooth, first word, first step. Really these developments are just instants on a continuum. We notice what has gradually been changing and give it a name. The tooth has been growing under the gums. We notice that it has broken through. Some things change quickly and some are very slow. Some require feedback. Avery is making lots of sounds and her desire to communicate is strong. We repeat the sounds we favor and baba becomes associated with bottle. It is a fascinating process to watching her making these associations. We are listening for words from Avery and  guiding her development and she is also influencing us to be responsive to her.

Sunset is a moment we mark on the arc of the sun as it crosses the sky. I watch for frost but I can do nothing to influence its timing.  I  find the things I have no control over, the things I can only watch for, are the things I take most for granted, the things that anchor me in the world.

This evening we walked up to the water tower and caught the sun setting into a thin band of fog in the west over the ocean.

In the middle was a pleasant unmemorable workday. It was wonderful to have my day bracketed by these two arresting images It got me to look up this website http://www.earthsky.org/tonighthome/ so I could identify Venus.

Here is  what I noticed:
Carpets of damp brown pine needles shaken out of the trees by the wind.
Strips of eucalyptus bark across the trail, no new fallen limbs.
Two ducks have returned to the muddy pond after months away
Four late pink ladies, the last of the season
Newly washed colors stand out against the gray sky

I babysat my eight month old grand daughter Avery for the whole weekend and have dubbed her the ‘taxing enchantress’  I took her out in her stroller in the park yesterday morning. Molly trotted along side not straining at the leash at all, quite content to play the nanny. this was Avery’s second journey into the park, the first was this past 4th of July,  when her parents carried her up to water tower hill and we all watched the fireworks in our neighborhood and over the bay.

Someone has dumped rolls of carpet and bags of fragments outside our house on the sidewalk. This is the third time in the last couple months someone has considered our corner their own private dump.  A few weeks ago some one got rid of a load of junk by putting it in a tarp in the back of a pickup truck, attaching a rope which they tied to a telephone pole across the street, then driving off so the tarp dragged the junk out of the truck and dumped it in the street. None of us who live across from the park ever see the secret dumpers.  Who are these people?  Judging from the carpet fragments, broken ugly furniture, children’s toys, big bag of cat litter, and miscellaneous trash; it’s a big family with bad taste who’s cat died, and they do a lot of remodeling.  We all call the city and they come and pick it up sooner or later. I’m beginning to think we need a surveillance camera but I’m not sure I want to know what it will reveal. A lot goes on on the edge of the park that is probably better left in the dark.

The trees were swaying and paper was blowing across the park as Molly and I took our short walk tonight.  My foot is doing much better , but I found that it is still difficult to walk off the path on uneven ground when I attempted to keep us out of tree range. The gusts spooked me as I tried to calculate how far a branch could fly if it were shaken loose.

Yesterday I saw the before and after x-rays of my foot.  I think i will call it my new foot as the bones are so symmetrically aligned now.  The glow of the moon against the black sky reminds me of the glow of the bones exposed in the dark film. To think I walk on them everyday and I’ve never guessed how lovely they are.

There were real clouds this morning with texture.  If I could reach up and grab a chunk of one it might feel like cotton candy or finely spun steel wool. No chance of rain, but the promise of real weather in the future and a refreshing change from the uniform blanket of fog.