Embrace the pure life, part two

Part one here.

Recently, my husband and I were in the City Market in Moab buying supplies for my special needs daughter’s formula.   For fun, we sifted through the motorcycle skullcap rack, looking for a skullcap €”with skulls €”that my husband might like to wear in addition to the one I bought him following his recent brain surgery.   That one is a black tieback cap ornamented with grey and white skulls clenching their crossbones in their teeth €”defiant pirate regalia.   It goes well with his salt and pepper beard.   I glanced toward my next destination €”the laundry soap aisle €”and noticed a man there, early-to-mid sixties, prowling restlessly up and down in front of the soap.   He glanced at me briefly then returned to studying the shelves.   I thought I detected more than a little bit of address in his glance, and indeed, when I entered the aisle, he whirled around and accosted me.

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Embrace the pure life, part one

One morning last summer I came up out of Crossfire carrying two objects I wasn’t carrying when I entered the canyon.   The first was a fully intact turkey tail feather that I plucked from the trail.   As I admired it, I noticed an oily sheen on the dark-brown barbs near the feather’s tip.   I stopped in the shade of an oak tree and raised the feather into a shaft of light filtering through the leaves. When the sunlight struck the feather, chevrons of rainbow colors appeared in the vane, very rich and vibrant in hue €”a bit peacock-esque.   Who would have thought a turkey could produce such a gem?

The feather was a natural object, shed by a canyon resident.   My second found object was in a way the feather’s counterpoint: a container of commercially produced bottled water, over three-quarters full, dropped along a steep part of the illegal ATV trail that has caused such a ruckus in these parts.