A little gray car drove slowly past, the driver and passenger peering out the side window. I started to wave, but for some reason unknown to me, I didn't raise my arm with the usual friendly salute, and they didn't wave either.
"I wonder where they're going," I pondered.
The road itself is seldom traveled. It once held a destination, many years ago, but now it doesn't go anywhere. It just stops a mile or so up around the curve.
I had set out early in the afternoon to look for a tree. I needed a special one - a White Pine, small enough to transplant, crowded among others that ensured nature would eventually cull it anyway, and it had to look "just right."
As a boy, and well into middle age, I always loved to search out the perfect Christmas tree. And, every year I did find the perfect one, always after a long, long search and miles of walking and wandering, revisiting each one I found that seemed to fit the picture. The comparisons, viewings from every angle, imaginings of what it would look like in its new home, dreams of the season dancing in my mind...
At some time in my life, don't know when exactly, I realized the woods I had wandered held dozens of beauties. Almost whichever tree I picked would have seemed the perfect one when I got it home... and it would have been. The search wasn't as much about the tree as it was about the exquisite cloud of magnificent dreams drifting above a snowy tramp in the forest.
I found the perfect little White Pine, dug it up carefully, and placed it gently into a big cardboard box in the back of my pick-up, ready for the ride to its new home.
The afternoon was one of those cool September gems hinting at fall, but clinging to the fading summer, birch and poplar leaves glowing yellow among the evergreens. High clouds framed in the brilliant blue sky wafted quietly overhead.
As I put the shovel away and started to raise the tailgate, I glanced once more at the view surrounding me where I was parked. It was gorgeous! Not the breathtaking beauty of magazine covers, but absolutely gorgeous in every way.
Instead of raising the tailgate, I left it down and plunked my behind onto it, feet dangling, and sat in silence, mesmerized.
The little gray car came by again a few minutes later, retracing its route, as I knew it would. I imagined the man and woman as they disappeared on their way back, pondering, "I wonder what that guy is doing there."
My perfect little pine tree and I sat for another blissful hour, seemingly not doing much of anything.

An afternoon of reflection at my lakeside bar. A fair amount of clutter - not uncommon for a Saturday afternoon at camp, but not likely a photo winner in any kind of formal showcase.
I'm so tickled with the concept. It's a great space saver on the deck, elevates the seating above rails of the don't-let-me-fall-over-the-edge-and-crash-onto-the-ground vision-destroying safety feature mandated in the building code, and allows one of the prettiest and most comforting views this side of heaven.
I spent several hours here today after accepting half a dozen stings from an angry horde of flying scorpions that infused strange visions and boyhood good memories as I dreamed upon the water.
Chainsaw at full throttle, trees falling in a perfect pattern as I cleared brush in the bush, a red hot coal burned the tender part of my forearm where it crooks by the elbow.
Immediately the coal turned into a big black wasp, which I forgot as the red hot coal at the corner of my eye came front and center.
Mary said she heard the F word before she saw me crashing through the woods, glasses in one hand, the other flailing frantically in arcs bigger than the circuit of the sun.
I sat at the lakeside bar, surprisingly unhurt, despite six stings to my eye, cheek, jaw, neck, and arm, all down the right side.
After a few minutes, feeling fine, but with a few tender spots, I went back to the lonely chainsaw, still purring on the ground two hundred yards down the trail. "If I had been attacked by a bear, which is the fear of many people, a howling chainsaw would be a mighty welcome, and probably effective, partner, but it's more of a hindrance than a help with a wasp stinging my eye," I thought, and went back to my brush clearing.
Later, relaxing at the bar, after checking the security camera I had passed on the sprint to the cabin, that showed nothing but the trailing gasp of my butt in high gear dashing fast and disappearing from that 10 second video clip, I wondered what I would choose if asked my most memorable childhood moment.
I don't know why I wondered that.
I think the magic moment may have been the serene December night when I was 12 years old, and my older 13-year-old beautiful girlfriend hugged me and kissed, a long, warm, tight, glowing lip message, as clouds of snowflakes, big as stars and gentle as duckling down settled silently over us.

The gentle flame of a quiet candle adds joy to the early darkness of September's evenings.