My friend Ed, a counselor, told me once, "There are so many wonderful things in the world, if you just know where to look for them." This little phrase pops up in my mind pretty much every day...to the point of complete annoyance. Except I do think a bit of perspective is a good thing sometimes. So I have to remind myself that living here in one of the most desireable spots on the planet, in relative security and with enough food to eat for a week, means there's almost an imperative to go out looking for at least one wonderful thing once in a while.
As oppposed to, say, just moping around.
In general my search for the wonderful doesn't go very far. I am pretty lazy. But I do like to walk, and one of my favorite things is to find new trails or roads and to follow them until I get hot and sticky and can't find my way back again. Call it a compulsion.
I'm lucky now, because our new house is only two blocks away from a huge trail system that winds through all these natural canyons. There are so many different trails that I can take a new one each day. Today I cheated and started on the other end (I drove!), and ended up in the old Olivenhain Cemetery, which I knew was around here somewhere, but I'd never managed to find it before.
It's a perfectly wonderful creepy old cemetery. There are dead weeds all over it. There are some new plots, from old-time families that can trace their histories to the beginning of the colony here, but for the most part it is unused. Olivenhain has kind of an interesting history in itself: apparently it was started as a fraudulent land deal where all these poor German settlers were lured in with the promise of good farm land and got bracken water and marshland instead. They figured out they'd been duped and ganged up on the guy who'd made the deal for them...the Olivenhain official history says merely that he "left town for good" after that. You could tell the author--a great grandson himself--was more than a bit proud of his family for their old-fashioned way of making things right.
I've met some of the descendents of those families, and I can certainly imagine them clubbing a neer-do-well over the back of the head if the inclination so took them. There's still a kind of cowboy mentality here that's defended vigorously by the patriarchs. I found this out to my detriment earlier this year, when I confronted one of them for starting a 20-foot high log fire in a wooded area with kerosene. I rather got the impression they thought I deserved a clubbing for doubting their fire-making capabilities.
But I digress. Anyway, there they were, all dead and lined up in a little row with dead weeds blowing all about. It seemed most fitting. And it reminded me to keep looking for new things to ponder every day.
Staves off Alzheimer's, don't you know.
1 comment:
I love finding the odd and not so odd little things in the neighborhood. Like this house just up the street from me which has this furry, little hilley kind of grass. It reminds me of Ireland, though I've never been there. I decided to call it leprechaun grass. This little front yard with the leprechaun grass and wild flowers and other greenery enchants me.
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