Heads or Tails?

I asked this woman if I could take a picture of them this morning as we were setting off up the hill with Spike. She was very obliging not only attempting to line them up but letting another one out of the car.  We got to talking, her name is Karen, and the conversation eventually turned to fire as conversations do here. She said that Los Alamos Road used to be her favorite road and she not only ran up it,  she loved to take the dogs to the regional park at the end of the road. Because she ran (I can't even imagine walking up that road), she got to know a lot of people who lived up there. Now they are all gone, and the regional park is a stark stand of burned trees. The conversation turned to the innevitable conclusion, the fact that there is nobody in this town who is not touched in some way by these fires.

She introduced me to to dogs too...Charlotte and Beezus are the only names I remember and said that she needed to go home and give them a bath. I said that must be quite a production and she airily said, "Oh, they're very good in the tub. I get in with them...." My mind boggled at the image of Karen in the tub with her five English bulldogs."

By the time we had finished our conversation, John and Spike had disappeared up the hill and I considered the possibilities of catching up with them unlikely. I could take the clockwise route around the hill in hopes of meeting them on their way down, but knew that there was a good possibility that John, using the same logic, would reverse course and we would miss each other completely chasing each other round the hill like a dog chasing its tail. I elected to stand at the intersection so that either way they came back down they would run into me. 

There was a third possibility that they would wait for me at the meadow, but I covered that possibility by asking a man heading up if saw a man with a spaniel could he please tell him I where I was.

I was almost frozen to the ground where I stood waiting by the time they ultimately appeared , Spike barreling full speed ahead into my shin, further impeding my forward progress, but eventually we repaired to the Trail House for hot coffee and a chat with two ladies who admired Spike. 

The beeping and grinding continued today,  but they were working in front of the house which was less immediate. We are going to be in for more of it on the other side when they get ready to move their even more enormous mounds of dirt and repave their driveway. We certainly could never have imagined ourselves in the middle of a construction zone when we moved here to quiet, rural Sonoma County....