In the beginning there were two small trailers, a flowing well and dirt-rimmed shallow ponds surrounded by greasewood, a spiny plant with which I was unfamiliar but hoped to eradicate…

We walked the ponds waiting for tiny grasses to sprout from hopefully strewn seeds and for sticks stuck near water to leaf out…

Which, after a few years, some did, though the survival rate wasn’t great.

Twenty years later a week ago Tuesday brought us, still uncertain about the truck [yet another truck], up the pavements…

… to the Gerlach Post Office for our oft-deferred mail, then followed Willey’s bellydump eight miles down the gravel to the gate

where the verdant combination of twenty years and a wet late winter [same views] was much evident, as is the greasewood;

A week, punctuated with Friday’s previously documented driveabout, proceeded through good sleeps, high winds, small tasks, meals on the porch…

…and weather as “unseasonable” as ever; warm, chill…whatever.

All continued in much the same vein through the weekend unto yet another Tuesday, last day, assailed throughout by National Propaganda Radio’s surreal reports wherein I “learn” [or interpolate while sewing, waiting for watercolors to dry] about “Losers’ Lounge! Cruz picks Fiorina for running mate!”…like this will play well in…California?  Meanwhile the Trump machine thunders on, with irresistible bombast…and Hillary, though I wish she wouldn’t, becomes more shrill and obnoxious the closer she gets to…losing to Trump? Oh wait, no, to clinching the Demo nomino, largely thanks to the way Republicans redistricted the country to favor Establishment agendas, putting Bernie at a disadvantage everywhere…hmmm.  Plus her people may be, um, falsifying results? Feeling the burn, Bern?  Game of Thrones this ain’t; it’s much much seedier, all of which makes Lefty a little suspicious.

Wednesday it’s onto the next drama/newscycle; the dogs and I we make it down the desert, back to the pavement at Doyle, the usual brief interlude at Heather Glen and on to Benicia…

Flat light for a briefly hectic California sojourn before packing it up for summer…to where the greasewood’s not cloudy all day.

[Sunsets sold separately and subsequently]

M