The Place: 7 a.m. walk with the dog. Air is a damp, bright, 70 degrees, which promises more blistering weather. What I call "allelujah lighting" is happening on a host of clouds--some gray, some black, some white--strewn across the just sunris'd sky. These clouds, remnants of a weak storm somwheres south, are lit from below, so the rims are almost liquid metal, golden, fantastic.

A block away from my house I want to rush back home, and snag my camera, capture the magic of that ephemera. That inclination is followed by, "Things that good don't last." So, I savor the moment, the view, the burst of heaven over the British Handyman's trim blue and white house, and I move on. As I walk away, I also realize the inverse is true--nothing that bad lasts that long. Something to continue to remember here, every day in Ventura.

I come across a friend I had forgotten--the crazy crow who sits on the back windshield wiper of a minivan a couple blocks away and attacks the image of himself in the back window. "Die, minivan, die!" Oh wait, that's me. :D I'm fascinated when animals discover their own selves reflected back in a mirror or window and how they react. I had a cat once who would immediately go into crab stance and make big at the mirror, then attack it. Amid peckings at the window, this guy leaps on to the top of the car, and caws up to the sky in frustration, as if calling to his gods for help. He must wonder why that awful, threatening enemy is so close, yet every blow he strikes at the it glances off like teflon. And the dance goes on and on.

And just over the left shoulder of this scene is Two Trees--preening in the lighting that makes them look so young, so vital, so now, Charlie. Glowing with the hillside, basking in that early morning September beauty, I could feel them drinking it in, as did I, with thoughts looking toward winter. Soon, Two Trees will be in crisp, grey light, or totally obscured from view and I will have on jacket and scarf for this early routine. It just unfolds. But for now, we have the dog days of summer, with nights that promise fall.

I realize during each moment that I yearn to write, and this yearning has been dormant of late. And so now, I am here.