Sandhill Cranes

Earlier this week I headed for Nebraska to visit my family and travel with them to Kearney, Nebraska to view the migration of the Sandhill Cranes.  We all ride with my brother who has the largest vehicle (that uses the most gas).

We drove out one afternoon, took a side trip on the way to the motel via a dirt road where the cranes are feeding in fields on corn leftover from the Fall harvest.

 After checking into the motel and eating supper at a local restaurant, we returned to the same area where we walked out to an old railway bridge turned walking path over the Platte River and waited for nightfall when the cranes would come in to roost (?) for the night in the middle of the river where predators are less likely to reach them.

 

 We weren't close enough to see a lot of them but we could hear them up and down the river.




My sister brought her dog, Laska, so she and her husband stayed down nearer the bank of the river rather than on the bridge closer to the onlookers.  The rest of us went back and forth between the bridge and the bank.
 

 

 While we were hanging around talking, waiting for the sun to go down, an eagle flew over our heads...

...and then disappeared down the river to the west.

Next day we headed out to the blind at Rowe Audubon Sanctuary at 5:45am to watch the cranes wake up and fly away for another day of corn scavenging.

If you've never done this, you need to.  At least once.  

 

Passages

I just started an online course titled "Creating the Work You Love" because so far I've pretty much just created work I abhor. Tama Kieves, one of my favorite people in the world, who wrote This Time I Dance developed the course.  And you gotta love this gal.  She went to Harvard law school and became an attorney only to realize she hated her life, despite having pretty much anything she ever wanted, materially.  So she sold everything and quit her job and rented an efficiency apartment in an old house and took a job as a waitress so she could write.


A waitress, ya'll.  I don't know if I could want a writing life bad enough to take a job as a waitress.  I think I'm bent more toward the direction of housekeeper or dishwasher.  Which reminds me of a thing I heard on NPR about a year ago about a guy who has an ezine called, oddly enough, Dishwasher.

He travels from place to place on a Greyhound bus and takes dishwashing jobs wherever he goes and stays a while and then moves on to the next place, all the while blogging about it.  I am completely and totally intrigued by this guy.  And by Tama Kieves who, by the way, screwed her courage to the sticking place and followed her dream despite everbody in her life thinking she'd lost her mind.

Here's what I'd do.  I'd buy a little, tiny, old camper

and fix it up and either trade my SUV in for something that would pull it or else borrow my husband's truck and travel around the country for a couple weeks at a time, every 6 weeks, or so, and write about whatever I see and do out there, wherever I go.  I have lots of family in the midwest and figure I'd spend a lot of time up there.  Mom and kids and siblings.  And one aunt who's on hospice.

And that's another thing.  I'm running out of time.  I feel like the sand's rushing through the skinny part of the hourglass way too fast and pretty soon I'm going to be dead.  And I can see my grandsons standing around, all stocky and hairy-legged in their khaki shorts because I figure they'll be grown by then, crying because their Nana is gone far too soon and me lying there cold and blue-lipped not able to do shit about it.

That's the real issue here.

How am I gonna stop this time from passing till I'm gone and haven't done so many of these things I wanna do?  It's funny how one thing leads to another, so much.  And I suppose I'm right on schedule with all of this, being in my 50's, and all.  But underneath the rational intellectualizing, I'm terrified.