Allophile

...flowing again...

..after several months of being reduced to a few pools between long sandy stretches, Sabino Creek is finally free-flowing again!

Yesterday afternoon, as I went on my run into Sabino Canyon, I heard a strange 'new' noise--ahh! rushing water! I peered down to the creek bed--full of little rapids. The rain and mountain snowfall earlier this week has trickled down...

So today after work, my wife and I went on a little hike...(camera in hand...)

The ear's hunger for the sound of running water can be forgotten,
then instantly summoned...and satiated.

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Off to the SE: the remaining snow on the upper slopes of the NW flank of the Rincon mountains, seen from the cottonwoods along lower Sabino creek:

...the sycamores and cottonwoods are just reaching their peak fall color along the lower stretch of Sabino Creek, finally a flowing creek again after months of being just a sandy wash:
...a still pool, here and there among the new rapids:

...desert evening sky, always a balm...

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Our friend/next-door-neighbor has had to leave the country suddenly; his elderly father's health has taken a turn for the worse...I end up thinking back to my father's last few months before his death just before I finished college...I wonder what it's like to have your father around, to talk to, fully adult-to-adult, all through your 20's...your 30's...into your 40's...

I'm half-way through a short novel right now, "The Cellist of Sarajevo" by Canadian author Steven Galloway...(click here for the 'book jacket')...As I read the harrowing account of the Balkan war in the early 1990's, I think back to the few conversations my father and I had about the experiences he had in the Korean war forty years prior to that...When I was in college, we'd regularly have coffee together in the afternoons, and he'd begun to talk about some of the things he'd seen; he'd been a very young soldier in the latter part of the war, having left Maine to join the army...

...and I think of my grandmother, in Korea during that same time,already widowed and worrying about her eight children (my mother was the youngest) while the U.S. and UN troops and the North Korean and Chinese troops marched back and forth across the country, flattening and re-flattening everything...Time (she died right after I finished high school) and language (I'm still not fluent in Korean) have precluded my talking with her about those years...

So many stories.

So many words...