Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Two hours in the dentist’s chair yesterday. Cleaning, followed by a crown prep and filling two cavities. When Kate came back from the dentist on Wednesday talking about the sticky fluoride treatment she’d received, it made me realize we’ve had no fluoride in our water for over 20 years. Living with our own well.
Took Gabe and Ruth to the Upper Maxwell Falls trail yesterday afternoon. We didn’t make it to the falls, instead wandering off on an alternate trail that climbed through jumbles of boulders and large, rocky cliffs. The regular trail is very popular in spite of its out of the way location. Over the summer there have been no fewer than six cars and often twenty parked at the trailhead.
We examined plants. Ruth found a snake (she wants one for a pet.), but it slithered away 
beneath the rocks. We climbed on the rocks and looked out. Nature provides something new, something noteworthy every foot or so. It was a slow hike. Here were lichen, familiar forms from Minnesota. There was a very late blooming Indian Paint Brush, its fiery bloom resting on the ground. The trees, some of them, were huge, trunks so big that Gabe, Ruth and I couldn’t get our arms around them holding hands.
Maxwell Creek exerted the magnetic attraction that water has for humans. We went down twice to be closer to it, the first time we crossed over to the alternative trail that we followed. The second time we crossed back to the Falls trail. Ruth talked about some camp counselors who followed a mountain stream to its source, an artesian spring, drinking from it, since “water is never fresher.”
Being in the Arapaho National Forest has its own version of mindfulness, one in which attention leaves the world of the day-to-day and focuses on an interesting rock, a blooming flower, the sound of water rushing over rocks, the view from a boulder. The eye scans for what is new or unfamiliar, being delighted constantly by a patch of cowslip, a bit of lichen on a lodgepole pine, a small squirrel playing peek-a-book around a thin aspen trunk.
Ruth and I are going back this morning, taking Kepler along in his harness.
