Morning Walk

Took the dogs for their morning walk up by the old "Smith" farm for the first time since Emma died. No one is living there right now and as I drove by the house I was surprised to see how dead it looked. There were weeds growing in cracks in the driveway and the place had that desolate air of an unoccupied neglected house. I slowed down as I passed the equipment shed and was relieved to see the door closed.
(It's called a shed but it is really a large tin building big enough to store a tractor, a truck, and other farm equipment.)

No one was living in the house but whoever owned it seem to be using the land surrounding it. There were about 20 cows meandering around in the field to the south and five horses grazing in the field to the west. I drove about a quarter of a mile past the house, parked the truck, and let the dogs out of their kennels. The second their paws hit the ground they raced up the dirt road toward the top of the hill.

I always like walking this road because I never know what I will find. The road up the hill runs through what was once the town dump. Stuff is always working its way up from under the packed dirt whenever the city sends the road grader out to scrape the road smooth after a rain storm or to level out the "washboarding" ruts made by the harmonic oscillation of the tires on the cars speeding over it.

It is amazing what you find. One time I found an old green glass 7-Up bottle that the road grader had uncovered. The grader had scraped off just enough dirt to expose the front part of the bottle and the painted on 7-Up label. I tried to dig the bottle up by scraping around it with a sharp rock but the ground was like cement and after ten minutes I quit.

This morning on my walk I found the following:

- large piece of blue and white checkered fabric
- tube of toothpaste buried in the road with only the letters GLEEM showing
- bottom of a rusted out metal pail
- beer cans, some flattened and others ripped apart
- dead flat guinea pig
- broken brown beer bottle
- a thin six inch long solid metal rod
- rusty bolts ranging from small to large in size
- large section of some type of machinery cover, painted orange
- small piece of white tarp sticking up out of the ground like a napkin setting at a formal dinner
- pieces of glass, large and small, sharp edged and dull, clear, brown, and coke bottle green in color
- rusty nails straight and bent, various sizes
- small pieces of a porcelain toilet
- rusty bits of wire of various lengths
- an eight-ounce glass Coke bottle
- whole brown beer bottle filled with packed dirt
- small rusty springs
- large and small pieces of white plastic of unknown origin
- rusty cabinet hinges
- chunks of old tires
- large and small chunks of concrete in various stages of wear
- rusty tin cans, some half buried in the ground
- a piece of flat metal so rusty it looks like a piece of dirty lace
- plastic 20-ounce soda bottles
- small pieces of rubber that look like they may have come from the inside of a tire
- rabbit remains made up of bones and fur
- some sort of U-shaped rusty iron fasteners

Quite a collection. The road grader must have been up there recently.

I am not sure how the dead flat guinea pig got there. It was dead and flat but it hadn't been dead and flat for too long because it still looked like a guinea pig.

Only flat.

And dead.