This is incredibly beautiful!
To my left is a pasture, green as the emerald city, immaculately kept, complete with six llamas, cream and brown, heads bent to the short mossy green grass they are nibbling. The matriarch, cream with brown spots like a giraffe’s, occasionally lifts her head to stare at the person staring at her. To my right are acres of grass green as heaven and ahead is a strip of firs and deciduous trees which probably line a stream. I toddled down a country road not far from husband’s place of business and took advantage of a perfect day here on our second week in Oregon.
I won’t tell you about the afternoon, only that it involved getting the internet connection and three trips to the AT&T store to get a Hot Spot that worked intermittently and drove us batty, back to store to disconnect same spot, reconnect our data card, that didn’t work either, back to store to get everything straightened out. Now we have a data card that will hold us until Friday when we get an in-house connection. But then I said I wouldn’t regale you with this story, but I didn’t want to sound all sweetness and light.
I love where we live here in a little Scandinavian town outside Eugene Oregon. We live on a beautiful quiet street lined with lovely homes, and words can’t describe how we are so grateful we are for our house. Most of the homes here are owned, but to our great advantage the owner of this house is out of town and renting—TO US! I’m afraid to put nails in the walls to hang pictures, although the property manager said it was all right.
AND, guess what. Frogs! We have frogs. Open the door at night and there they are singing their little hearts out. One must be careful walking out the front door, though, lest they step on a squishy little skin-bag disguised as a frog. It reminded me of the anole I inadvertently painted into a porch step of our Hawaiian house—painting in the dusk I didn’t see him until morning when I discovered a relief, all gray -blue of an anole on a riser.
“The frog calls the
rain that settles the dust for our journey.”
My long-time readers will know that long ago I published a journal called The Frog’s Song, for one day I drew the Frog Medicine Card twice. I figured that was significant and used the frog card’s mission statement. Frogs are significant to an eco-system as well—rather like canaries in a mine I suppose.
We had Coqui frogs in Hawaii that made jungle sounds and lulled us to sleep at night. And here we are in Oregon, once again with frogs singing. There is a pond kitty-catty-cornered about 100 yards from the house. And not far away are the wet-lands outside Eugene where the ducks fly in at night and other water fowl nest and land for a reprieve in their migration. When we lived in Eugene years ago I heard that flock of wild swans settled in for a sleep-over one night on Fern Lake.
As I said on the last blog there is something here in the Eugene area for everybody, from up-scale to down -scale. There are more second-hand stores than you can shake a stick at—although I never understood why anyone would shake a stick at anything—it was a Mom-ism. While I sang the virtues of Eugene, someone helped themselves to a nice wicker basket I took to the Laundromat. Then somehow I ended up with a strange pair of jeans from I don’t know where, that fit me—sort of.
The Universe takes and then it gives back.
