(From yesterday)–It’s hard to stay completely gloomy with all this autumnal color.  It almost takes your mind off all the gloom and doom.  The nice hoppy Iron Line (OH) trolley stop session IPA didn’t hurt, either.

…still, there are always flowers to remind one it’s not over yet.  I found these around the yard.

Not much to say today.  I’ve reached bad news overload; E keeps me abreast of the latest trump lunacies.  How do people tolerate such insanity?  We fear we won’t live to see our country restored to where we left off, before It the Evil Clown took us back to medieval times.

Always nagging at the back of my mind is my TN family’s sad predicament, and my current inability to help.  All I can do is wait it out.

Closer to home, I’m having one of my typical anxiety attacks over stupid tech stuff that I’m not savvy enough to reconfigure before I lose it.  I feel like a relic of a bygone century, and there’s no one to help!  Aagghh.

At any rate, there’s always a good microbrew, in this case Iron Line (OH) coal pusher porter, perfect for the first fall chill.

After Hocking Hills, the Fen was literally a stroll in the park, but it was nice to see it turning colors.

The Fen was one of the first wetlands I experienced when I moved here.  It looked like a barren apocalyptic graveyard where no life could exist, but over the seasons, we watched it spring into miraculous life and transition along with us.  It has matured into a whole new habitat since we started observing it.  Maybe it mirrors our own metamorphosis here.

Yesterday we strolled through the Yellow Springs annual street fair.  It was like a hot summer day, perfect for a fair, but very unseasonable.

When you enter, there are always a couple of adorable alpacas parked outside an alpaca clothing tent.  They make these cute, sad noises.  There was clothing, jewelry, arts, crafts, ethnic foods, plants, local educational and conservation orgs, and street musicians.  We couldn’t afford much, but we did get falafel and kibbeh at our usual friendly Lebanese booth, which always seems particularly popular.

I didn’t take my usual photos; I was all photoed out from the exhausting previous trek.  Here are: the early morning sky, a gingko tree covered with fruit, and the alpacas.

We finally made it to Rose Lake, a dammed reservoir full of fish and freshwater jellyfish, surrounded by autumn color, which is where my battery died, and I almost did.  We sat on a bench eating sandwiches and catching our breath.  The second half of the trek was mostly the deep old hemlock forest.

Can you find the queer sign?  I couldn’t resist.  😉

The only way to describe Hocking Hills and Old Man’s Cave is massive and ancient.  It puts one into one’s place and everything into proper perspective.

A silent ethereal forest of towering hemlocks, hundreds of years old, old stone and soaring metal footbridges, waterfalls and pools, makes you think you’re in the Hobbit Shire.  Climbing and tunneling through ancient caves and sandstone rock formations, you really feel how tiny you are in the bigger picture.  Centuries of rushing water have carved out what look like naturally flushing toilet bowls in the solid rock.  There are many fascinating species of ferns, lichens, fungi, and sphagnum mosses covering everything, and tenacious tangles of tree roots clinging to huge boulders above the forest floor.

There’s no way to capture the uniqueness of this place in amateur photography, but I’ve tried.  You can gauge the massive scale of everything by the tiny people.  We hiked all day, almost 10 miles, or so it felt.  It was an exhausting but purifying kind of journey.

This will be in three parts.  That’s after I eliminated many shots!  It took me three days just to process!  There is nowhere in this park that isn’t incredibly gorgeous.  I can’t do it justice.

One of the hardest things is having to wait patiently for just the right timing to make your move, knowing you’re needed elsewhere and can’t get there yet.  It takes a sort of faith that all the wheel notches will finally align, allowing the safe to be unlocked.  You can’t panic or rush things; they’ll happen in their own good time.  Hopefully those to whom time is of the essence will understand.

Meanwhile, back at the Almanac, it’s unseasonably warm and humid, just as it is in many places.  Record-breaking hurricanes and other climate-change effects are taking their toll all over the country.  Those with their heads in the sand will drown along with all the other victims of their stupidity.  But for now, we’re making the best of an unnatural situation.

Here are some roses, mums, herbs, and a very nice Hi-Wire (NC) bed of nails brown ale.

Here is a poem.

“Homeward”

Our own humble backyard may as well be the great outback, it’s such a novelty just to be able to access it whenever I want!

I cleaned up the “memorial garden”; it doesn’t look like much now, but it’s just a preview of a garden of our own to come.  Anyway, the birds and critters love it.  I like to think Michael, the neighbor in whose memory it was maintained by me, would approve.  He was a great perennial gardener.  Sadly, he succumbed too young to a fate all too common around here.

This cute little snake was staying warm in a favorite snake hangout behind the building.

Ornamentals are still performing around the place.

I rewarded myself with this wonderful Tröegs Weizenbock, a nice spicy balance of malt/yeast/hops for a warm fall day.

One thing I’ve learned here is to appreciate and never take for granted the mundane little things in the moment.  You never get that moment again, or have any guarantees in life.