Suddenly Sunday it cleared again,

affording us the unimpeded view unseen by Simin for four for dinner, conversation ranging from Singapore to Colombian jungles, upstate New York to Huerfano histories and internet woes with wine sausage chicken and…well maybe a little more wine than usual.

At the end of a mostly sleepless night I fell to dreaming that cattle were being shipped out [by ship] across the Smoke Creek while off the Wall Spring porch a scraggly bearded guy

abandoned a car and was walking all around, turning aggressive when I said it was private property…soon enough more people, Burners maybe, turned up and then more still, some in carnival masks, infiltrating the house, milling about like refugees…Refugees.

A disturbing situation easily traced to the week’s news.

I woke stiffly sore into Monday but Tuesday,

a day for the ‘burg, came all too soon; the dump, Safeway and First Choice Market

[tamales from Texas, thankfully nothing like Cactus Flower’s deepfried doughies], Gardner for the mail and an afternoon of frustration without internet thanks to our “upgrading” provider

Colorado Catastrophic Telecom.  Due to their lack of helpful communication L. spent over six hours getting nowhere with that and two more the next morning before it was finally sorted,

after which we had a day, or I had a day as the rest of hers was filled with phone calls.  The upgraded-by-her-internet works fine as long as a person doesn’t mind grainy videos that don’t

load – apparently an outstanding new feature of their…say “fuckedgrade”?

All that week my brother Kirk was in the Owyhee canyons of eastern Oregon, in smokiness

apparently, and I contemplated what that might have been like…projective memories.

Thursday we made it up Fossil Hill and then hosted yet another dinner for four*,

this one almost all Libre so the conversations stayed more local [including but not limited to the inevitable CCT complaints] while meanwhile the poor Taliban, dealmakers at their own local level, discovered, soon after attaining a modicum of power**, that they had to deal with asymmetrical warfare on their own, including but not limited to Dead Americans [always an iffy proposition] for which the Trumplicans immediately blamed Joe Biden, as does the illustrious Ron DeSantis [for his not eradicating Covid in Florida].***

Next morning we returned to the Knoll, noting the mysteriously iconic inverted conic excavations which proliferate here in late summer [anyone know who does this?] then

descending

to find summer’s luscious grasses mostly done…

And so, not [quite] September.

*Salmon, potato salad, green salads and an amazing healthily homemade rhubarb pie from our nearest neighbor…

**Be careful what you wish for, eh?

***…oh well, too much to list.