The Garden Fairy

I love these colours on my boss. They are warming and different. Look around your town centre and spot the people wearing different colours, not too many in my experience. 
Sunday in Montana. Relax, do what you want, watch three games of American Football simultaneously! Flicking between channels during the constant commercial breaks did my head in. The ‘Murrikans accepted it as normal, I didn’t. I sat on the verandah with my binos, searching the mountains for movement. Bears, a few deer, and spectacular scenery. That morning I hauled myself from Grandma’s feather bed at 0500 and sat there in a fleece, shorts and sandals waiting for the Sun to appear over the mountains. The river was covered by a fine mist, the water gurgled and sang. In those final seconds of shadow a bright halo appeared over the distant peaks then wham! The sunlight was split as if it had struck a diamond. Beams of intense light entered the valley and were refracted through the mist. This was genuinely one of those ‘forget the camera, soak it in’ moments I wrote about recently. 
We did have a great day on the river, using a fishing raft. Six of us piled in and pushed off, one of the ‘boys’ was briefed to pick us up at a landing spot about five miles downstream. Sun, cold water running at 4 - 5 knots, brilliant. We hardly had to steer, which made our passage even more fun and slightly erratic. When you are part of nature on the water the animals are almost unaware of the two-legged destroyers presence. Consequently deer, black bears and other critters would raise their heads, look, laugh and carry on browsing. 
I noticed the unmistakable signs of Beaver tree surgery. How such a relatively small animal can chew through a two foot diameter tree is fairly amazing. Then I saw one. All the others were looking in the wrong direction; I still believe that if her boyfriend hadn’t pulled up his jeans I might have missed this one. Une Beaver, au naturel, a wondrous and warming sight.