Isabella Bird Miscellany

It is currently 91 degrees - this looks more than inviting It’s a warm late summer afternoon.  I’m sitting on the patio under dappled shade from the grapevines clinging to the pergola.  The fountain is bubbling away and my phone’s Pandora app is playing “How to Save a Life” by The Fray.  It’s not often that schedules allow for two whole hours without needing to do something – a lazy luxury. Listening to the various songs floating out of the pink and gray-clad phone, my mind wanders to a tantalizing pastime for such an afternoon…skinny dipping in a back road swimming hole.  Now don’t get all shy and embarrassed.  There’s an exquisite freedom of ditching the shorts and boots while hiking to have a refreshing swim in a crisp mountain stream or indulging in the natural hot spring you stumbled upon.  Even the hormone-driven teens heading to the river for a plunge understand the bliss. Speaking from experience, gliding through cool waters sans clothing is revitalizing and lovely.

This is the road I want to travel Stuck! Tail lights go whizzing by like streaks of red tracers on a bad trip.  The next moment, screeching sounds as brakes lock up and traffic is at a standstill.  How can you be flying along and then find yourself on a collision course with the Prius in front of you?  Why all the movement spurts in an everyday commute story that doesn’t make logical sense? Impatient, you peel off at the next exit looking for a way around the congestion.  Gridlock messes with us, insisting on its own annoying way.  Mindless of the inconvenience it doles day by day.  Ugghhh!  As you come to another stoplight and detour. Unless you’ve just come back to earth from some remote pie-in-the-sky- island where things like clocks and schedules and to-do’s have never been heard of, you know the treadmill feeling I’m describing.  We are up to our ears in the influx of truckage.  The freeway should be fast, the shortest distance between two points – three or fo