Keep Moving | Keep Living | Nov 6, 2021
Music:
(1) Holy City -- Coda | Nocturnal Emissions (EP),
(2) Inner Jungle -- Blond:ish | Welcome to the Present,
(3) Keep on Livin -- Jazmin Sisters as featured on iPhone -- I love this song, but my husband found it too repetitive for a 15+ minus video, and so that's how the other songs ended up here.
Series: Big Sky Country
Photos/Videos: Me
*** *** *** *** *** ***
Another morning in Mt. View, we gather around the breakfast table with my MIL. My glowering, growling BIL is nowhere to be seen today. I noticed from our second story big picture window while I did yoga to wake up that he is walking all the way around the rental properties to get to his hovel--a place that used to be my FIL's art studio and then my MIL's dearly departed boyfriend's art studio after that.
My husband and I have good reason to believe my BIL uses this space for a Meth lab or to at least divvy up Meth to resell it. This is where he keeps his poor dog who remains locked in what sounds like a very small space without food or water. The way he guards and locks this area of the family property, one would think it was Ft. Knocks.
The only way to access this area is to scale a concrete wall and enter through the roof that use to be the studio space. The other half is a Japanese garden my MIL's boyfriend created. Oddly, my BIL is watering this garden because I could see the plants are alive from a second story window as well.
I see little of him or my MIL that day, and we go back to Fremont Older Open Space Preserve again. The day is cloudy but no rain and the views from the mountaintops are always extraordinary. We take a new trail goes past a riding trail where young riders are learning how to ride horses. It also passes a wonderful vineyard and winery.
After these memorable spots, we hike up another mountain to discover a target practice range below us. This one is for bow and arrows, and we've heard a gun range on many hikes somewhere on this side of the mountain. We descend hoping to find a loop going back to where we entered, but a group of hikers heading up this trail tell us it dead ends at a parking lot. So we backtrack up the mountain and loop around on the many trails on the mountain tops.
We are pushing the sun set, but this is fortuitous for me because I get many amazing shots of the setting sun against rippling could from up high. My husband keeps hurrying me as I keep lagging behind and once the sun sinks down behind the mountains, darkness falls quickly.
I put my phone away but regret this for near the trail that takes us down to the road that takes us to our car we come face to face with a coyote. He/she is magnificent and is standing in the middle of the trail as we approach, not moving at all but keeping an eye on a man with a German Shepard behind and now us in front of her.
We watch each other for several minutes then she gracefully walks right past us only veering a little off the path to go around us. I only get her passing us as I fumble with my phone. It is well after dark by the time we reach our car, which is fine as we are very use to walking the road in the dark now.
We stop at Trader Joe's for stuff to make dinner again, but before we make our dinner, my husband wants to pull the cover over the pool again. We did it yesterday and the pool was much warmer to water jog and exercise in. I have been doing it every day we have been there since I injured my neck and now missing physical therapy being here. But, I feel it is essential I stay here with my husband for the whole situation is starting to feel like it is slipping from living in the Adam's Family house to living on the 'real life' set for the prequel to Psycho.
I do not yet realize how accurate this feeling will prove to be. I do not even know when we will leave. I take the side of the pool cover closest to the house. I get so absorbed in trying to keep it straight that I completely forget about the steps on my side and step off expecting hard ground but only find air.
I begin to fall face forward. As I fall, I somehow twist in mid-air and lean towards the pool. My left knee is the only part of my body to hit the hard bricks of the pool deck and I fall backwards into the pool -- a perfect, soft fall. I even manage to hold on to my glasses as I plunge underwater.
This is what instinct does for us. When we find ourselves in situations where making all the calculations and decisions to avert disaster would take too long to make, instincts kick in and do it for you (and probably do it better than mentally, painstakingly doing it yourself). We are powerful beings when we let ourselves be.
It was jarring to realize had I not twisted and bent myself towards the pool as I fell, I would have fallen down two steps on my head. I would probably be dead. This would happen again in another way 6 days from now, but that is another story for another day.
