A Story From the Naked Country

I had been wondering where the line, "There are eight million stories in the naked city, and this is one of them..." came from? I was thinking about it and noting that the same thing is true in the country. It's on a different scale, but everyday so many things happen, little things and big things, things that take our breath away, things that compel, delight, or make us scratch our heads and wonder. There are more stories than we can tell, so most of the time we don't tell any of them at all, not about the goldfinches that gather in throngs under the birdfeeder and fly off in unison at any imagined hint of danger, nor the abundance of raspberries on this year's canes, or the way the moonlight pours through the skylights and makes night into day. There is a poem or a post in everything we see, but we don't write it down or photograph it, we just notice.
Roger was walking from the sauna, around the house to the gate when he noticed something fall or fly from the garden-hose caddy to the ground. He assumed it was a bird, but when he went to investigate, he found that it hadn't exactly fallen to the ground, but into the valve tunnel for the outside sprinkler system. He grabbed a flashlight, and saw there 18 inches below the surface a little chipmunk, scared and trapped. Okay, now what? We didn't want to put our hands down there and try to grab the little thing, even with thick gloves on. I googled "rescuing trapped chipmunk" and read one account where a chipmunk bit its rescuer all the way through leather gloves. We eventually settled on putting a piece of pruned wood from one of the fruit trees down into the hole. We figured the chipmunk would have to know how to climb up and out on such a familiar piece of bark. I waited a while with the camera ready, but it was not going to oblige me my timetable. So, I left, walked to the mailbox, talked to the neighbor about rescuing chipmunks, and when I returned, it was gone. Yay!

It's just one little story, but one that took some of our time and attention on Saturday. On Sunday, we had a moment of reckoning with our real estate agent and came to a mutual agreement about cancelling our listing agreement. I would have hated being on the receiving end of the letter I sent to her. I don't pull punches, and I am very straightforward and to the point when I am disappointed. So, now we start all over with someone new, or not. Perhaps we'll just try to sell it ourselves. We don't know yet.
At least the apples in the orchard are abundant and beautiful this time of the year, aren't they?