One Small Tree

It's not particularly imposing, but this little tree has a certain dignity about it which caught my eye this morning as we walked across the dam above it at Spring Lake Park.
I like its symmetrical shape, as if it has had grazing animals underneath it nibbling off any unruly hanging branches. Deer are an ever present possibility.

We've had a visiting skunk who has dug a hole under the fence and comes just about every night to dig around underneath the bird feeders, flinging aside OilMan's ever larger piles of strategically placed rocks. (Did I ever mention that we have lots of those?) Ozzie spotted the skunk at dawn one morning, but apparently some vestigial memory of previous skunk encounters prevailed, and he left it alone to saunter away.

Our washing machine stopped working when it was full of clothes and water the other day. I have never been very happy with it because mold had grown into its gasket, making it impossible to remove the moldy smell. There was evidence that the previous owners had tried to eradicate the smell, and the page on the washing machine in the appliance literature they left for us, covered in phone numbers and incomprehensible scrawls did not bode well for getting it fixed. We bought a new one this morning.

The first time we looked at this house, OilMan and I both knew it was what we had been looking for for years. Neither one of us can say exactly what it was that convinced us of this, but it didn't take long. One possible reason was that we thought we could just move in without having to do anything to it. Although we have no regrets about buying it, in the almost two years we have lived here, we have managed, for one reason or another, to change every room, and remove almost every vestige of previous owners from the house. OilMan's oft repeated mantra is, "this is the last project!"

Perhaps living in the same house in Berkeley for 45 years had something to do with it. We never were very good at living in "other people's houses".