Ramble with Storm: Left Behind

Mulling things on my morning ramble with Storm, our family’s mixed Lab.

For most of the last week, the Canada geese have disappeared. The exception is a lone goose with a bad right wing, which has been grazing and crapping in the outfield of the ball field most mornings.

Maybe it is a molt migration, but it seems late for that.

The lone goose was there again this morning, half waddling with its wing out, around center field.

And “Left Behind” came to me.

Listen, I’m a Christian, who had a long journey away and a long journey back.

But the “Left Behind” theology strikes me as precisely the kind of thinking that allows the world to slip farther and farther away.

Maybe you can be scared straight, but I suspect, just like for “a girl in trouble,” scared straight is a temporary thing.

Oh, that is a perfect excuse to look up Romeo Void’s classic song from my younger years on YouTube.

You have to love YouTube for music. Other stuff? Maybe not so much.

I have often wondered if in this day and age if a lead singer who looked like the one in Romeo Void, even with her strong voice, would ever get a chance.

While I was watching the goose, a woodpecker hammered a wooden light pole in the outfield. At that distance, I didn’t even try to find it, let alone ID it.

The morning started off summery. Humidity cobwebs clotted on the neighbor’s shrubbery. The meathead felt obligated to run a gray squirrel up the other neighbor’s maple.

What is the point? Every freaking day. It’s there, so the meathead has to chase it?

Wait a second, I am guy. I think I understand that thinking.

A goldfinch flew off as we crossed the side rail into town. Finally had a few summer-colored males showing up around our thistle feeder. i suspect it is because my wife’s sunflowers are maturing.

An algae bloom exploded overnight on the north old clay pit. Surprisingly, we had more than an inch of a very soaking rain yesterday, so it must have triggered a bloom. That is my unofficial guess.

The water on the south pit looks perfect, the kind of color that makes a fishermen like me want to fish. I can’t fully explain why that color triggers the desire to fish in me, except I am sure it connects somehow to accumulated knowledge.

Not a single rabbit this morning.

Mourning doves were fewer this morning. The ones I saw were on the ground picking grit. Very few were cooing.

I am pretty sure there is a connection between falling air pressure and increased cooing. And, conversely, on a day like today, there is a connection between rising pressure and reduced cooing.

These things rumble around my head on rambles.

That one on doves is catching my interest enough that I googled a few articles on it.

So the mornings pass and become days.