Miracle Rose

This is the first Sunday since the fire that the power company, the communications companies, the tree cutters and the residential fire remediation companies have taken the day off, and it seemed to safe to walk up Los Alamos, usually a quiet country road but lately choked with trucks of every description...

We took Spike for a walk in his new harness up the road and he was like a different dog...well behaved and sitting quietly when we stopped to look a something...like a newly shorn burned palm tree *. It's all a matter of thinking like a dog...a blind-in one-eye-sniffer dog at that....As we were finishing up a zoom conversation with Lady Findhorn, Spike's trainer's daughter came by for a visit. She and her father are both obviously very fond of him.

The devastation remains the same. For reasons we don't understand, the debris of the houses that are total losses cannot be cleared until each lot has been inspected and cleared by the guys in the hazmat suits. The toppling walls and teetering chimneys left standing seem far more hazardous than some household cleaner that has leaked into the soil and it seems an unforgivable delay both for the property owners who want to get on with rebuilding and those of us still standing who have to look out on the sad ruins of our neighbors' houses every day.

It's sad that the man made landscape doesn't come back to life the way the garden does. Our garden is fairly roaring back to life, especially after a bit of rain on Friday. It had been our plan to take out all our brown roses and start over, but today only one of them remains brown.*..and lo and behold! even it has a rosebud blooming amidst the brown leaves. I almost cried....

I have vowed not to write or even think about the disgraceful behavior of the defeated president. I can't say that we were in any way surprised by his demented and mean spirited behavior. What does surprise me is that such a large number of people voted for him despite his intellectual, political and moral failures. As the Washington Post wrote this morning, "On stark display (are) two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to accept what the other considers to be an irrefutable fact." However, Biden HAS won and not only that, but when he is sworn in in Washington on January 20th he will have two women from California standing right behind him; Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. I'm hoping Trump and his whole family will just stay home.

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