The other night a whisper coaxed me out of the house with the dogs and my camera to capture a night photo of the full moon. I didn't think twice; my mind had been heavy with doubt and worry and needed to unwind itself under the beauty of nature. We let the sweet wind in through the car windows and sang songs in our head to the tune of the crickets. I drove a windy road to its top, and there beyond the brush I witnessed the days end in vibrant shades of setting sun. It was just a golden strip at first through a thicket of navy colored trees, and then it opened into a full flamingo sky like a neon sign. It had been a long while since the sky lit up like it did that night. There was a large release as my circulating calculations slowed and sank with the sun behind the hills. The warm air was gone too. And all at once the landscape was blue. Whatever is above us, beyond us, before us, behind us.... sometimes it challenges your wholeness... what ifs flutter around like embers over a flame. I was supposed to see the sunset. It hushed these useless mutterings.
This is the mine up the hill on our property. Well technically it is on the land beside ours, but nobody lives there. It is quite eerie. A hole in the hillside A place of the hidden and abandoned. Our small town has thousands of mines. I think he mining era is still rich in our blood here. I pass people on the street and meet them in my work who are third or even fourth generation Placerville, never left, and have the wild eye of a lawless, gold-panning coon trappin, whisky sippin mountain man. I swear there is some wild west in our town still. My parents were however, not born and raised in this little piece of gold country. They were city kids who scrambled off to the country. So in some ways when I see the primitiveness that a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada's can bring into its people, I get a little nervous. Sometimes its as if I am watching a frightening movie and the plot is thickening but I am not really in it, just watching, like I can get up with my popcorn and leave at any moment.
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