I read your blog on my morning flight above the valley.

Twit! Twit! What an imagination!

You make up a sermon in your own mind and attribute it to me. Please don’t humiliate me with credit for this.

I do not mind you coming to my valley. You are too big to eat, but otherwise you’re just a curiosity. You’re in poor condition. You’ve lost all your feathers, and your skinny wing bones are pretty comical. You have two legs, but you also seem to need to carry a wooden leg to help you walk about. I don’t see how you manage to eat, but since you obviously can’t fly to spot food, and are way too slow to catch it, you aren’t any threat to my territory.

I watched the hawk circle in the valley below Fishers Peak. It seemed majestic, soaring effortlessly, patching the green below with a dark shadow as it neared earth before circling and gliding again. In my imagination, I wandered to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and thought of independence and freedom – the image of rugged individualism we prize in our American culture. We have a special day to worship it each year – July 4 – just a few days away.

As I mused about this freedom, this magical mirage dissipated in the inrushing tide of scientific knowledge. There really was not much freedom there at all. Only in my mind did this fanciful notion have much reality at all.

As I spent a few days in the village below the mountain, I noticed that chimney swallows were nesting in my chimney again. At first it was just the noisy squawking of chicks waiting to be fed.Then it happened. Thum—pinggggg. Something had fallen and hit the draft plate of the stove connected to the chimney. Over the next few days, I let the mother birds out of the stove periodically (a couple times a day) to fly out an open window to return to search for food as they continued to try to feed the chicks in the nest that rested inaccessibly in the stove hardware. Going that deep into the stove to feed the chicks left them unable to find their way out the open chimney.

Jack: Hey Deacon, what brings you up into these remote parts? I’ve just got the fire started for some morning coffee. Take a load off those weary old bones of yours, and you can have some. And I’m going to have a few pancakes before I set off today. We can share those too if you want some. I’ve got a dab of honey left, and some blackberries to go with it.

Deacon: I was camping over at Curry’s Grove and thought I’d make a quick trip across Hook’s Pass this morning to see you. I’d like to invite you to come to town weekend after next to go to church with me. We’re having a special Religious Toleration Sunday, and we’re all out collecting people of different faiths to tolerate that Sunday.

Yowie: Shhh! Please! Just sit down and be quiet for a bit.

(10 minutes pass.)

Yowie: Hey Jack, glad to see you. What makes you come this way this morning?

Jack: I didn’t mean to interrupt your meditation. I just saw a patch of bright blue among the trees and decided to take a detour off Thistle Trail and look at it. I’m on my way up to Brokeneck Cliff for a day or two.

Yowie: Meditation. Schmeditation. I wasn’t meditating at all. I was just sitting here being an animated part of the scenery this morning along Cold Creek. There’s an incredible lightness of being when I’m not Yowie, or Grandma, and nothing takes notice of me except to see if I’m going to eat them or they can eat me.

It was worth camping overnight to watch the sun rise between the darked Matha’s Children peaks from Cat Back Ridge. Around Memorial Day, the sunrise catches the groove between those points at the very place it begins to peek over the horizon, shedding an eerie backlight through the fog topping the valleys below.

Being Memorial Day, the (Less than – in my opinion) Honorable Rep. Hiram Peabody will be putting the final touches on his dull-witted speech he delivers each Memorial Day in hopes of getting re-elected to the easy life in Washington. There will be the dutiful mention of local recently dead soldiers, and of those stoned into immortality atop pedestals in Remembrance Park. Afterwards he will kiss the cheerleader (a professional kiss, not a real one) who will have floated through town in the Memorial Day procession atop the hood of a new Lincoln described tastefully as being proudly provided by Jones Brothers Ford.