Quiet Time

Photo: Mr. Dickie (Chinese Garden - Portland, Oregon)

A certain amount of quiet alone time, whether it is spent meditating, exercising, reading, listening to music, or being creative is, I think, essential for the mental health of most human beings. (Barbara Powell in Thinking Outside the Church by Jennifer Leigh Selig, p. 297)

Yesterday I mowed our yard and the front yards of two of our neighbors. One of the houses has been vacant for many months. Right now we have six houses out of one hundred and twenty vacant. Two of them have For Sale signs which have been up for about a year. One of them is a group house. We don't know what's planned for the rest. The situation is probably going to get worse before it gets better. All of the homes in the neighborhood are single family dwellings. Quite a few of them appear to have more than one family living in them. We don't know which houses are being rented, but we have some idea. There's trash all over in the streets and the broken trash containers remain at the curb all week long even though trash is picked up on only two days. It's not a good place to be retired because one spends too much time at home looking at the changing environment.

We enjoyed seeing the nice photographs posted by Kim and Javier after their recent trip to Panama.

Mr. Dickie