Posting "snapshots" of travels or daily lives has been a tradition for us over at the FRL forum. However, some kiddies have seen fit to trash it over there lately, so if you all don't mind, I'll start a thread here.

-------

The wind followed the bayou all morning. Wet and heavy, it had come from somewhere down in the warm and salty gulf stretching over the southern horizon to where ancient temples wear the emerald robes of ruin.

It smelled of lightless depths and the creatures which lived and died in the cellars of the sea. It carried the memory of salt grasses and mud flats; the bitter aromas of razor clams and wild sage hugging ranges of ragged dunes. The low clouds it brought sheltered the day from sunlight, and turned the shallow puddles into looking glass shards to serve their own vanity.

Twisting along the sawgrass and blown-out cattails of blackened banklines, rushing through the brown feathered limbs of the autumn cypress, it brought the weight of it’s history to pound against the old green-painted door, calling me to breathe it’s moist embrace. I walked out, leaning into it as if anxious for it’s intimacy, anxious for it’s stories, for whispered tales of drowned men and forgotten empires, and teetered there, between wind and earth as it’s burden dripped from my hair like tears, and it’s sincerity moaned under the cottage eaves.

---------------------------------------------------------

-- Lon Frank (lgal@exp.net), December 13, 2001

Answers

You need to get a place in Mexico Lon. Cept for the cypress you've beautifully described the area twixt Estero & Punta Bunda, BC. Had a home overlooking that but it went with the last marraige. Miss the home. Show up anytime.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), December 13, 2001.

Carlos, I love the interior of Mexico, and just about all of Central America. Especially Costa Rica and Guatemala, where you can see incredible beautiful women, wearing multi-colored shawls and the faces of Mayan ancestors, as if they had just posed for the carvers at some ancient temple.

---------------------------

-- Lon Frank (lgal@exp.net), December 13, 2001.

Envy your experience but remember that tho beautiful they may be they're still women. Better to enjoy the scenery.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), December 13, 2001.

Lon, that was good!

Carlos, that was bad.

-- helen (binary@on.off), December 13, 2001.

Lon, you've got the poet's eye (and ear and nose). I feel like I am on your bayou. Thanks.

-- (lars@indy.net), December 14, 2001.

Very nice, Lon. Thank you for sharing it.

-- Pammy (pamela_sue57@hotmail.com), December 14, 2001.

Just thought I'd drop another one in here:

The Wood Cutter

The north wind rushed up like a ragged feist dog, gnawing the backs of my hands with hard little raindrop-teeth. An old sweetgum nearby shuddered in her sleep and moaned slightly, as the sky fell down about us.

I reached out and placed finger tips lightly upon her living flank, and bowed my forehead to the ancient crevasses of her breast, in one moment sharing a primal memory of a time when man and wood and stone and sky were one.

A single red-brown leaf flittered across the forest floor like a crippled sparrow, and breathing-in nothing but a breath of silence, I lifted the axe and again turned to the work of men.

------------------------------------

-- Lon Frank (lgal@exp.net), January 25, 2002.

Beautiful.

-- helen (lon@is.too), January 25, 2002.