Sometime snow?

Today was a gray and dreary day.  It sat in my backyard waiting for the snow to come.  Cat-like, still and statue-ish, only its tail twitching...it waited, yet the snow did not come.  I've wondered alot about the odd weather..the Titmice who live along the back fence line, are "peter-petering" a lot more than they normally do in the winter and the silly raccoon is STILL eating all the bird food in my feeder at 3 in the morning.  The weirdness actually started with the 4 Gray Tree Frogs I found  this summer hopping around my living room.  It was so hot, steamy and rainy that even they felt the need to come inside! If it doesn't get cold and snow the number of mosquitoes will explode...imagine 9 billion bugs with a death wish.  To the east of me, earthquakes are happening due to, the experts think, fracking...OK, well finally, someone agrees that making the earth Swiss Cheese-like (more than it already is) might be a problem.  Mother Nature is not happy.  Yet each day as the sun sets and the moon rises big and ripe, its shadow reaching out to me across the field, I exhale and think about how wonderful nature is and what beauty lies in the small things which I often overlook. 

At Panera today, a friend and I were talking of things and, in a move that I normally am guilty of, a voice from another table commented on what we were talking about and then said without compunction, "I was eavesdropping".  I laughed and said...Yes you were!  From that introduction, the 3 of us entered into a lovely, serendipitous conversation about a lot of things including, his photography.  He shared with us a wonderful photo that his son had taken of a Red-Shouldered Hawk (I'm a sucker for hawks) sitting in a tree literally pulling a mouse inside out as he gloriously prepared his hard-earned meal for consumption.  The beauty of that hawk, its black-tipped feathers and rufous colored head, so striking in the sun that I caught my breath upon first viewing it.  There is nothing so brutal yet so indicative of life as a predator eating its prey.  Viewing it was both terrible and wonderful...evoking the memory of a time when I was so alive with this understanding that I too howled into the wind....tears and laughter mixing together in such a way that my backpacking partner asked me if I was REALLY ok?!  It was on that day that I realized that life really was just all about the basics, the raw bones of life stripped down to just what we need every day which for me at least, in no particular order, is food, water, shelter, space, air and love....and it is this last, I think, that makes us uniquely human. 

I realize that I've gone from point A to B with my thoughts and that possibly how the wierd weather and love have anything to do with each other is not at all evident.  In my humble opinion, my ability to wonder at the wierdness of nature is an indication of how out of touch I am with the very thing I love so much....nature...the great outdoors.  Society and my dependence upon heated air, frozen food and love/friendship which comes through an electric wire (which I am so thankful for!!!) has made me soft, forgetting the lessons I learned out on the trail when I carried everything I needed on my back. I do not claim to have learned the lessons of a thru hiker but like every true wanderer, sitting by any window allows my imagination to go down that valley or wander across that street and then just keep walking.  It is this call of the wild that my hawk friend feels everyday...and he, unlike me, gets to fly away.