of rabbits and a water pool

[gurdonark]

We arose at 6 a.m. Sunday to attend a 6:30 sunrise Easter service at the little Methodist church near our home.
The service was conducted outdoors, in a small "courtyard" of sorts (actually, more or less a space that was not quite parking lot and a little more than a sidewalk) by the teens of the church. We sang vigorous alternative pop hymns to acoustic guitar accompaniment. We heard the resurrection story read in scriptures and then dramatized in an appealingly understated fashion by kids assuming the role of Roman soldier, of Mary Magdalene, and of Peter.
While the service was in swing, a rabbit, with perhaps a sense of the bunny moment, came out from the shrubbery and sniffed around at the edge of the action. Choruses of birdsong enlivened the morning air at Sun Creek.

We went together to Mimi's, where we had the restaurant virtually to ourselves, and we each had a bowl of oatmeal, improved and fortified with banana, granola, milk and brown sugar. Then we returned home, where my wife resumed her sleep, and I played on the computer prior to heading outdoors.

I drove to Sister Grove Park, a county park which frequently features wildflowers in the Springtime. When I arrived, a famly was picnicking in one of the newly-constructed picnic shelters, which made me happy because the park is under-utilized, and made me less than perfectly happy because I like that the park is under-utilized.
I took a fifty-minute walk through the lake loop trail, largely looking for wildflowers. I heard a cardinal's song, and then looked up at a branch to see the cardinal.

Although some flowers are blooming, the flowers are far from a typical Spring array, due to our local drought.
Lots of the grasses were still only partially recovered from winter, and stray flowers would peer out amid the new growth and the old.



I did see some nice little stands of wild flowers here and there, but in the main the show was not as showy as the ordinary April.

Even on the drive back, in which wildflowers did line some roadways, the vigorous fields of flowers customary to our Spring landscape were more the exception than the rule.


I saw a rabbit in the scraggle-woods.

My favorite scene was not a flower field at all, but instead a small pond I came upon on a little spur that deviated (as I often do) from the trail:


Little frogs and small fish leapt from the pond--perhaps catching insects top the water, perhaps escaping from the proberbial big fish that rule such small ponds.

I drove home, took a nap, and got a few things done.

We went in the early evening for a walk around our neighborhood with our dogs Bea and Ted. The temperature was nearly 90 degrees, so both dogs felt quite well-exercised by the ramble. Bea tried to stubbornly resist the portion of our trip in which we passed by, without stopping, the little picnic table which had been imperfectly cleaned. There is something ludicrous and yet encouraging about a stubborn 14 pound dog trying to plant her feet and make a stand, but the insurrection was politely quelled, to the distress of none.

We drove for dinner at Inaka sushi, after we found our favorite pho resource was closed. Then we came home, where I found that my brother had sent me a sing-along shanty song he had created with music notation software, and then I slept so as to face another day.