A walk into the New Year

January 5, 2015- Journal entry. It feels really funny to be writing 2015 already. On the other hand, it feels so normal. Enjoyed our walk along Lynch Creek with Bob and Gigi, our standard poodle. There’s an encampment of folk who live under the 101 bridge over this creek, and they were playing quite a series of drum patterns, bongo-like rhythms drowning out the drone of tires crossing the highway pavement above, the whiz of air swirling from cars moving north and south, a sworm of vehicles zooming to their destination at speeds of 65 mph and more and below them this group of people, guys probably young, who even had a section of bamboo fencing installed so you couldn’t really see them, drowning out the noise of their movements, the drumming a noise made by fingers on stretched animal skins, far more pleasant than the  noise of rubber tires on asphalt. I wanted to give them a thumbs up or a Bravo but feared starting something. Like what? They wouldn’t wade the creek–now a foot or more high from the rains, and come over begging money would they? They were fellow human beings making the best of an intolerable situation, having no home, homeless, or roofless as the French call it, a less harsh condemnation of their circumstance since homelessness conveys a sense of soullessness, for what is a home except a product of our soul. a place to hang our soul, a place hugely protected by our forefathers and the Constitution makers. If we don’t have a  home, we don’t have a soul. Yet roofless conveys merely a sense of open-aired housing; one is not souless; just roofless. But these guys had a roof, the curved arch of he highway overpass. Yet it would be 37degrees that night. We were done with our several days of freeze warnings on my iPhone. but I wondered how they would get through the night. Would they build a fire? The pink-blue sky and the brown green of the neighboring fields signaled the sun was about to dive below the horizon. i pulled my scarf tighter around my neck and put on my gloves as we walked Gigi back to our Volvo.

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