The 19th Day of Thanksgiving

Good Morning Gentle Readers, 

Before he passed, Dad's old place was on ten acres of Ponderosa Pine, Valley Live Oaks, and native Cedar trees located just below the snow line in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada between Sonora and Columbia. That was less helpful than it sounds. Sure, it was warmer and didn't snow much. Instead? It just rained. And rained. California is a funny place, there's an abundance of rain in the colder months, when there isn't much need for it. And there is very little precipitation from April thru October when the dry, dusty, ever-brown hills are left begging for rain and all that is offered up is wildfire. I was my daughter's age when I spent my first Thanksgiving with dad and his wife in Sonora. It drizzled and poured for four days straight as it did for every subsequent Thanksgiving visit that followed. How many visits? I lost count, but more than a dozen over the course of four decades.     

UPS and FedEx could never find it, though UPS had a slightly better track record. I suppose that was mostly because the house was at the end of a twisting, rutted dirt track that most folks figured they'd need a high clearance 4WD to traverse. He had an ancient Shivolay™ truck with an old-school granny gear that made short work of that road, but mostly he paid it no mind and barreled in and out of there in his Lincoln Lawyer Lincoln. Not the new Lincoln Lawyer, the 2011 McConaughey film version. 

Before the infamous drought of the twenty-teens, the first 100 yards of narrow road (the good part) was lined by wild blackberries that formed a twelve-foot high hedge along an embankment. Just past the quarter mile of blackberries, off in the pine trees to the right are a couple of houses. That is where I spotted this wild turkey.

As Ever,