A day after falling over the dog I was somewhat miraculously back on my feet, making it up the creek where coming down we ran into Muriel, Bill and Tami…Bill even took our picture with

the dogs and then it was home for an eventual Weather Surprise, radical thundering lightning,

and even hail, yes!

Friday looked to be perfect for laundry but

quickly changed after the creek walk to a persistent gentle rain so

two loads went in the dryer and at five, forty minutes late, we slithered down Leon’s muddy driveway where his 75th birthday party was already well underway…[second pic below shows

Desireé explaining the intricacies of his birthday message], continuing unto great feastings

which may have gone on well into the night although we and others started home just as

darkness and, most unfortunately Linda, fell…in her case doing a headplant into the icy mud.

I worried she’d end up like Sean Penn at the end of “One Battle After Another” but happily Saturday morning she wasn’t as ruined as might have been anticipated and we all were able,

to the delight of the dogs, to make the [chilly] walk up the creek enjoying early winter grasses.

The afternoon went to beginning winding down/wrapping up the studio, Refugee All Stars being the soundtrack of these last days [Banker White, one of Linda’s former CCA graduate students, had made a movie about them and I’d ended up with a couple of outakes of the album].

Great stuff…Above a little painting from the summer called “Libre – Sheldon 2025” and the bedroom wall with works by Patsy Krebs, Meridel Rubenstein, Nancy Haynes, MSM and MSM.*…then it was the evening, dinner by candlelight listening to an album from sixty six years ago

that still resonates – Miles Davis’ [+Cannonball Adderley’s, John Coltrane’s, Bill Evans’, Paul Chambers’, Jimmy Cobb’s and Wynton Kelly’s] “Kind of Blue” leaving us feeling fortunate to have been alive when that music had come into being as well as what it meant to us then and still….a lovely time, and poignant earlier times remembered.

*Other artworks in the bedroom include Dean Fleming’s, Robert Spellman’s, Linda Fleming’s and an anonymous sailing ship on black velvet from a Walsenburg thrift store.