On a clear winter day like today, it’s easy to see what is above it all, and why this is such a special place. Biking off the hill this afternoon, I ran into a fog bank. It felt like summer in San Francisco. The fog cleared in the valley, and there was Mt. Baker above it all.

Above it all were bald eagles too, one after the other. I counted over twenty clinging to the branches in the trees along the roads. Clear, calm days like today are dangerous days to be something a bald eagle wants to eat. Fortunately, they are not after me. Though, if you think about it, twenty bald eagles, working together could.

Nothing moves without leaving behind a track, some evidence it was here. I heard an interesting article on NPR that as we move, we leave behind a cloud of microbes as unique to us as our fingerprints. Yesterday, I left a track bicycling to the post office and the feed store, the one on the right, and one when I came home on the left. With the snow gone today, those tracks are gone, but there could be microbes that dropped from the cloud of microbes that drift around me.

Anna left behind this beautiful egg today. I’m pretty sure it’s hers. It was the only egg on the nest she was last sitting in. It’s a gorgeous tract.

More tracts are these winter sage, rosemary, thyme, and oregano. Chopped up, I used them in our lunch. They are now in my belly, leaving traces behind as they flow through me. Bits of them my body will absorb. Eventually bits will ooze through my pores and become invisible microbes floating in the cloud around me. A week from now, my dog may sniff the tracts I leave behind and wonder why it smells like oregano. Things never go away, they just flow on and on and on.