September 5

We slept in the open air loft of the woodshed. I remember how at each stir, the air was just a little bit cooler.

S has more words for me in the morning - looking out and commenting on how the farm seems to be frozen in time, waiting for something.  How different its personality is depending on who is here.  I have only been here when there were many others.

We have fry bread, oatmeal and coffee for breakfast.  Then it is time for the two of us to go find something together.  We have, today, been married twenty four years.

We walk to the stoney beach on the Stilliguamish River where the colored rock installation is.  I find a bare human footprint and make a plaster cast of it - specimen #5.  S wades delicately on the rocky bottom of the river - the motion is little different than the deliberate walk of the great blue heron.  S's is measured to not bruise the bottom of her feet.  The heron's is planned in precision to not warn prey of the hunt that is taking place.

In the afternoon, before dinner, we walk up the road past the quarry to where a creek from upriver cuts through on its way to join the river.  I collect one of A's seedbombs (from a place where I had hidden it 2 weeks earlier) - an unfired clay ball filled with native plant seeds.  It is specimen #6.  S and I talk about art on the way back.  I need to start building things, here.  I also have to rethink my mapping project.  Some of the ground is much too difficult for me to work in my normal haphazard manner.  I will plot the road, and easy task, but it will give me a place to start from and finish at on many days ahead - a reference that I will need.

Dinner is polenta in tomato sauce.  I bake a rhubarb crunch.  I like to bake and in a weird way, baking is for me is a place to start and finish at.  We sit by a fire until the stars are out bright, hoping for another 24 years.