As horse shadows prance across the wall, Allie, Abby's teenage poet waitress, tells me about a camping trip where she and her friends got in trouble with the law

As shadows of horse statuettes fell upon the wall, Allie, the poet who graduated early from high school, who recently turned 17 and went to her first "R" rated movie, told me another story about being a teenager in Wasilla.

This time, she and some of her friends, boys and girls, decided they wanted to go camping at Ninilchik, on the Kenai Peninsula.

Her dad didn't much like the idea. He said he didn't think so. She reminded him that she had graduated from high school, didn't live at home anymore, had a job of her own and was free to go camping with her friends if she wanted to.

He said, okay, but be sure to text him every day to let him know she was ok.

Ok, she agreed.

Concerning the diners above, it was an even larger group than it appears to be. I have two favorite tables and always try to sit at one or the other. They had pulled both tables together and so I had to sit elsewhere. I was glad, though, glad to see all the business at Abby's. I told the big group of diners about my ongoing essay on Abby's and asked if they would mind if I took a photo of them - as they were the largest single group I had to yet to see there (although one night when I was working on my India series I came in and every single table in the restaurant was occupied).

They were all good with it except for one lady, who had a baby on her lap and she thought her hair didn't look good, even though it looked fine and she looked good and so did the baby. I positioned myself behind the lady and the baby so the lens wouldn't see them and then shot a picture that showed everybody else, but not the baleen on the wall, or the picture of the chicken. There was no way to include the baleen and chicken without also showing the woman. It was a decent enough picture, too, but after awhile the lady and the baby left. I shot this picture with them gone and liked it better, because it shows the baleen and the chicken.

Did they catch any fish? I asked. No, she said, they just went to camp. It was a cold night. They built a fire and sat around it, visited, and told stories. 

Did you cook hot dogs on the fire, roast marshmallows? I asked.

No, she said. There was a lodge nearby, so they ate their meals there - but they brought a lot of junk food to camp - chips, pop and such. They ate a lot of junk food. A huge amount - she stressed. So much so she stuffed herself and it hurt her tummy.

There were some posts adjacent to the campground, along with a sign that said not to park beyond the posts. But they had gear and provisions to unload and carry to the fire and their tents. It would be easier to do this if they parked beyond the posts, closer to the camp, so they did.

(In recent months, I have begun watching "Thomas and His Friends" on TV with Kalib and Jobe. This sounds to me like the very kind of thing Thomas and his friends might do.)

As to what is going on here, the big group has left, others have come in, and Allie is telling this gentleman that he had better behave himself and not call her a 12 year-old again or she will make him go to the counter and pick up his own food.

He enjoys the scolding.

The young campers stayed up late, visiting, laughing, talking, eating junk food, having fun - but at some wee hour of the morning (which, as a reminder to you folks down south, would not be dark here the way it is down there.) they became too sleepy to last anymore.

Allie left the fire and crawled into her sleeping bag - and that sleeping bag was COLD! It practically froze her to climb inside it and then it took about 20 minutes for her body heat to warm it up and for her to get comfortable enough to sleep.

At a horribly early hour for teenagers who had been visiting and eating junk food all night by a fire, but who were now all fast asleep and wanted to stay that way, someone came in to camp and woke them up.

No - it was not a bear or moose someone - it was a cop! A lady cop!

She didn't even give them a warning, either - she just got right to business and wrote two tickets - one to Allie - because they were illegally parked. 

$110 tickets!

She scolded them pretty good, too.

To make it even worse, if Allie wanted to sleep some more - and she did - she would have to subject herself to the whole, terrible, 20 minute ordeal and climb back into a freezing sleeping bag andwarm it up all over again.

Still, she was very glad she went. It was fun, she said, and she drove all the way home without anyone spelling her at the wheel. She was pretty proud of that. She did it in good time, too. 

I had never seen these horses prancing on the wall before and, until I took note of it with my camera, not Allie, not Abby, not anybody there had previously noticed the horse shadows, which are a bit behind and to the side of where they would normally be looking. The sun has to be in just the right place and once they appear, the horse shadows don't last long.*

Abby was very pleased. "It looks just like at home!" she said.

So I pulled her in for a picture.

And speaking of home, that couple in the frame to her left?

That's the late Paul and Iona Mahoney, Abby's homesteader parents, both of whom now lie in Grotto Iona.

(For anybody who might have read the post I put up two hours and twenty-six minutes ago - I struggled a bit more, but the words just did not come. I hope they come tomorrow. I must finish this piece and send it out to where I have promised to send it. It has to be good, too. This is what they call "writer's block." I hate it.)

*Update, 12:39 PM May 17: Ever since I posted this, I have been bothered by the question of how the sun could possibly have come through the window at just the right angle to cast these shadows, so I went back this morning to check it out and to eat again. I discovered that, indeed, the sun could not shine directly through the window at such an angle. Instead, it was reflecting off the windshield of Abby's truck.

The B-24 and the non-written word

This is not what I had intended to post at all. Yesterday, I actually uploaded eight pictures into this blog from Abby's Home Cooking. I had a nice little story to tell with them, but realized I did not have time to write the story last night and so saved them for tonight.

Tonight, I realized that, once again, I did not have time to write the Abby's post, so I selected six pictures I took today that I could post with few words, but then I realized I did not have time to prepare and post them.

So I post this one instead. I took it from the window of a B-24 flying over Cook Inlet and I don't even remember the year. This, and another, B-24 is why I don't have time to do the full posts. I am working on some other writing and it involves B-24s, Mormon Missionaries, temples, funerals and such. I am not doing a very good job of it. Every morning since the beginning of last week, I have gotten up thinking I'll finish it off that day and then at the end of the day I have only a few paragraphs to show for it and I am not pleased with those paragraphs.

Until today, the project did not include an actual picture of a B-24, although it did include a picture of a picture of a B-24 being presented to the dying man from whose B-24 it had been taken, and another of a beautiful model of B-24 that he worked on off and on for all of his post-war life and never finished. This morning, I truly thought I could have it all written today, but then I decided I needed an actual B-24 picture and so I went looking through my B-24 take, which is pretty small. I found the picture I want - not this one, but another one.

This find set my mind on an altered track, caused me to bring in other pictures still, which means some of the pictures that were already set have to go. I junked everything I had written this past week-and-a-half and started writing again.

So far, I have completed three paragraphs and I am not very happy with them. I will surely junk them, too.

So I can't spend much time on this blog tonight. I must get back to the project and see if I can somehow find a few words to write for it before I go to bed.

Right now, I don't feel like I can. When I rode my bike this evening, every word that I needed came into my mind.

Where the hell are those words now?

I ride my bike again; a cloud, an airplane, shadow and lines and a moose-eating squirrel (No, I do not make these things up)

I am riding my bike again. No, that's not me - that's someone else riding a bike, pedaling towards me as I pedal towards him. I am going uphill. He is going downhill.

This means I have to work harder than he does - for now, anyway.

Actually, I have been riding my bike for awhile now - maybe three weeks. It was pretty tough at first, because I fell into bad shape over the winter. The worst shape ever. This was due in part to my bout with shingles (which still hang on a bit, but not so bad - just some itching now and then) and in part because I ate way too much food this winter.

Way too much. And I ate a tremendous amount in India.

So it was tough - especially after I did my first 15-miler last Friday. Fifteen miles isn't much, yet it sure felt like it Friday and Saturday and Sunday, too.

I am already getting stronger, though, and more fit. Still got a long ways to go, though.

I like riding my bike and I like walking, but, damnit, I wish I had an airplane. Well, I do have an airplane, but, as regular readers know, its been broken up and unflyable ever since I used it to cut down some trees in Mentasta over ten years ago.

How the hell do I get another one?

Yes, I still walk, even though I ride my bike. I walked right over this shadow, which fell across these two center lines.

I walked beneath this tree, and this squirrel chittered "hello" to me. We still see moose, but not so many as we were seeing just awhile ago. That's because the squirrels have come out of hibernation and are eating the moose, so there are simply fewer moose to see.

This squirrel ate ten moose yesterday alone.

You can't expect to see so many moose when just one squirrel will eat ten a day.

What are the squirrels going to do, after they eat all the moose up?

Squirrels really should learn to think about these things, not be so greedy and learn to conserve.

One day, they won't have anything left but nuts and seeds to eat.

And we don't even grow nuts around here!

So what are they going to do, then?

Too tired to blog tonight, so here's a sleeping boy...

To all of my 789,000,018.24449 readers in every country on every continent on the globe and a few beyond it as well - I apologize. I am just too tired to blog tonight. To tired to even explain. Plus I've got a task I've been working on for awhile and I absolutely must finish it before I go to bed and I figure that will take another three hours, maybe four.

I am too tired to finish it, but it does not involve writing but working with photos, so I will play some music loud - maybe the Rolling Stones, Credence Clearwater Revival, The Doors, Beethoven, Bach, a little Mozart, Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain and Nirvanna perhaps - that kind of stuff: loud, full of energy and heavy; current, up to date, cool and hip.

That should get me through it.

We bury our little Pistol-Yero, then celebrate Mother's Day

Readers who were with me then will recall that my ornery, sweet, loving, little buddy, Pistol-Yero, died unexpectedly while I was in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. I had wanted to bury him after I returned, but the snow was so deep, the ground so frozen and Melanie was working up north, would not be home for a month and it seemed that everybody should be here.

The snow is melted now. Melanie is back and everyone was coming out to the house Sunday. There is still a lot of frost in the upper layers of ground, but Rex is strong and so, using picaxe and shovel, he punched through it.

Muzzy and Akiak engaged in a long running contest to see who could keep the stick the longest.

In respect for the Navajo beliefs of their mother, Jobe, Kalib and Lynxton could not come near the body of Pistol-Yero and would have to stay inside for the funeral and burial.

It may be a small hole, but given the conditions of the earth here, it took a long time to dig - probably close to an hour. Charlie arrived and spelled Rex for bit. Akiak seemed to dominate the stick game.

I unwrapped Pistol-Yero, put him on a blanket that he had enjoyed in life and brushed his fur. Lisa came out as I finished and wanted to see him.

I then carried him to the back. Except for Lavina and the boys, everybody gathered around for the viewing and final pets.

Margie came out a little late, as she had been helping Lavina with the boys.

Then we headed toward the far reaches of the backyard, where, in the course of 30 years, we have buried a good many of our fur-clad family members - because that's what they are - family members.

Everyone told a favorite story about Pistol-Yero. Margie is talking here. She is saying how she always wanted to keep him off the bed and especially the pillows, but he always got on the bed and pillows anyway and she came to know that he really liked to have a nice, neat, clean bed and pillow to lie on. She also noted how Pistol had usually stayed away from her, because he always liked to hang with me and she would do things like chase him off of beds and pillows, but there were a few times when she had been sitting on the couch and he came to her and sat on her lap and let her pet him as he purred and that was special.

Melanie took her turn filling in the hole - first we did it by hand, then by shovel.

And finally, covered it with stones. Rex and Charlie had dug up this boulder during one of my forays into the house. Caleb placed it on the grave and we piled the smaller stones around it.

Lisa disappeared and then reappeared, carrying three blossoms from a Mother's Day bouquet Melanie had bought for her mom.

Rest in peace, sweet little Pistol-Yero... life is not the same around here without you. You would probably be sitting between me and my computer screen, right now, as I made a regular post about Mother's Day.

We then headed back up to the house. The boys came out and set a tire to rolling.

Kalib set the tire to rolling again as Lavina cooked. He scored a direct hit and knocked Rex down.

Kalib was very pleased, so he rolled the tire back up to the porch to see if he could down Uncle Rex again. He would succeed.

Jobe raked the house.

Corn, mushrooms and peppers were added to the grill. Soon, we would feast in celebration of Margie and Lavina; in celebration of mothers.