After coffee and breakfast this morning Tal and I set out to fulfil a promise we'd made to ourselves early in the week -- to do something fun on Saturday. We had options, some of them more fun than others: the Garnet and Black game, marking the end of football spring training, at Williams-Brice in Columbia; a ground-breaking for a new chapel at Gravatt, the diocesan camp and conference center; the Spring Fling at Monetta Farrier, to include horse-shoeing demonstrations an anvil shoot (very exciting, by the way) among others.
It turned out to be a hike -- and the closest of the things on our list of possibilities -- at the Lick Fork Creek Recreation Area. The Horn Creek Trail is a loop of 5.7 miles and "travels along the hardwood bottoms, across streams, and along pine ridges" (from the Sumter National Forest brochure). We are home now, weary but enthused. We walked in sudden showers and through just as sudden dappled sun, cold and damp to warm and steamy. Check out the trail at the link provided below.
I had the camera in the backpack, but used it little. Being aware that people with cameras really irritate people without cameras, I didn't want to push my luck! A snapshot is one thing, a 15-minute process to set up a shot is another. This was an outing to enjoy together. Having Tal standing around waiting for me wasn't part of the deal, from my perspective anyway. These are two of the flowers, however, that caught both out attention and paused our steady forward progress.
The trillium were in a low, swampy, heavily shaded spot and the lilies, interestingly, were scattered in several places on a slope in a place that looks as though it floods when the creek is up.
I can't help, tired and satisfied as I am at the moment, but reflect on the times I've felt this sort of contentment. I'm not going to enumerate at this point. Rather, I simply want to acknowledge that, while I'm a good priest, perform well on assorted office tasks and like to struggle with words, I also need to be outside and to make my body work. Today I was wearing Timberland boots, Carhartt jeans, a Life Is Good tee shirt, a vest from REI and a Royal Robbins cap -- all pretty indestructible clothing, nothing froufrou, and pretty much the real me!
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