.
Early Spring morning on the Batten Kill River.
It’s a river that gets around!
.
Wherever we drive, we somehow seem to find ourselves crossing it.
.
It was such a pretty morning, I’ll share a few more of the images.
.
Low clouds and low light.
.
A simple scene that always pleases me.
.
Crossing the Hudson, I felt I could reach up and touch those clouds.
.
Climbing a hill toward Clifton Park, the sky was completely clear…
.
…but around the corner…
Oh.
.
As always, we were early.
There wasn’t a soul in sight.
.
It’s never a bad thing to be early and more often than not I get seen before my appointed time.
Recently we were there and back almost before the hour I’d been given.
.
The red maples were coming into leaf.
.
Fortunately, we are of the same mindset where it comes to timing. At one of our first encounters, Grant warned sternly that he wouldn’t wait around for late comers to a meeting!
My second day with BOAC I got tangled in an impossible traffic jam on the and was late for work, one of very few times in my life that it has happened.
Being late while on probation was taboo, but luckily it was not held against me.
Then again, would it have been better if I’d been let go? My life would certainly have been different, but who can say if it would have been better?
.
As I would never have met Tim, I would definitely never have gone to Antarctica and probably not Tibet or many of the other places I loved visiting.
How many crossroads do we come upon in our lifetime, that affect our futures in drastic ways?
If I’d lost that job, none of the cats I’ve known would ever have come into my life. Maybe there are others out there that would have instead?
.
Generally, I am fairly fatalistic.
Why over-analyse what happened, unless there is specific value in the postmortem, of course.
.
After protracted periods of disruption to our schedule, from weather, strikes, volcanic eruptions, terrorist attacks – or any number of problems that affect aviation, we usually had a postmortem to decide what we could have done better.
By which management meant what you could have done better, but as all of those situations were different as well as the players, there wasn’t often much to be learned.
.
Flight delays had to be a coded, so the right department got demerits.
Finger pointing and squirming.
With so many departments working together to achieve an on-time departure and with so many factors involved, attributing blame was like trying to un-tangle Christmas lights.
.
It has been many decades since I attempted that particular task. I suppose Christmas lights are still a thing, but do they still get tied in knots?
Christmas – there an unlikely topic.
Which I shall not pursue.
.
Riding along in a car, you take pictures where you can. As many opportunities escape as don’t.
On River Road we came upon a red-tailed hawk sitting on a fence post. To stop would have set it to flight, so I had to make do with hurried snap.
.
On the return journey, however, we had better luck.
Domestic geese are unafraid!
This, as far as I can determine, is a swan goose.
.
They exist in the wild, but these were definitely attached to a barnyard.
.
Though they were wandering freely along the road.
If you are a swan goose, I guess you do pretty much whatever you choose!
Swans and geese being the stroppy creatures they are.
.
“What are you looking at?”
.
As a small child I was taken periodically to visit my grandma in Wiltshire and inevitably, we went out for walks.
My brother, being a small boy, picked up a stick and progressed along the lanes bashing the hedgerows and jumping in puddles while I watched anxiously for cows.
.
Cows were huge and they lumbered and sometimes, if we had the dog with us, we got chased, so I was very afraid of them.
The grown-ups looked out for the red flag before we ventured up onto Urchfont Hill where gunnery practice might be taking place. Years later a shell overshot and landed in the village, though no-one was injured.
.
When she wasn’t winding up the cattle, Judy the wire-haired terrier was digging furiously for moles.
A couple of memories stand out from those long-ago days.
.
One time we went to get water for my grandmother who liked it fresh from a nearby spring. It never occurred to anyone what a rare privilege such a thing would become.
But mostly I remember a big goose. I was very taken with it. Maybe I was told that it was being fattened up, but for whatever reason, I thought often about it, long after and all these years on I’ve not forgotten.
.
Considering how much I loved animals from earliest childhood, it surprises me that I was almost 40 before I became vegetarian.
Not that it would have been permitted when I was a child, when you ate what was put in front of you.
.
Once I lived alone though, I had the choice but never thought about changing the habits of a lifetime.
That is until I saw The Silence of the Lambs:
“You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs”
.
Thereafter, I never again ate anything that had to give up its life and I turn my head, if I ever find myself near the meat department of a supermarket.
It’s not something I expect other people to do, indeed it would be inconvenient if everyone was to become vegetarian.
.
Could not those poor farm animals be better cared for, though?
Coming home through Greenwich on Tuesday, we got behind a truck that was transporting a cow.
We followed it all the way to Cambridge and by the time we turned off, I was close to tears.
Whether it was going to slaughter or to the market, the poor animal will have been miserable and frightened.
.
Sadness can pop up out of nowhere to get you.
Today it was an article of news from Long Island, which was particularly upsetting because it involved cat rescue.
.
But so as not to end up on a sad note, here’s Dee Dee gloating over her stash of treats.
.
“Well open them, man!”
.
“Quickly, now!”
Thank you, Carolyn, for the wonderful post! I would love to touch the clouds, and here I could when climbing on top of the mountain in certain weather conditions. The swan goose is indeed beautiful and as a vegetarian, I cannot look at the meat counter too. Your house with all the pictures on the walls, the columns, and the cats is like a paradise. Like you, I too get before the appointed time and therefore I am never late. Your philosophical musing about choosing one door or another resonates with me.
Joanna
I love the handsome swan goose!
I also sometimes wonder how my life would turn out if I had made other choices … but somehow, I think I’m where I’m supposed to be (Berto will now say that’s the optimist in me who makes such a statement). I love your photos of the swan geese – I never knew that’s what you call these birds. If Dee Dee was a dog, she would have made a good guard dog😉.
So interesting to see the swan geese! Very beautiful!
I love seeing Dee Dee guarding the treats! 😍
The look that she is giving you is precious!
Thank you for sharing your travels, as well.
Catherine
If I hadn’t retired at 60, moved to Norfolk and decided to take up blogging as a hobby, I would never have met you, nor any of my other dear blogging friends. It doesn’t feel like fate to me, more like a series of circumstances delivering a different path to a life.
You were right to be afraid of cows. They still kill more people than any other animal in the UK every year, and also seriously injure dozens of others.
Best wishes, Pete.