Wild suburbia

Fourteen days and counting until I head overseas. I feel like I have a million things to do and nothing all at once. Trying to waylay some of this melancholy, I got up and ran/walked 3 miles along the trail by my mom's house this morning. The first part of the trail is in piny woods, the second part is along a marshy bayou area, and the final stretch is back into the woods until the trail spills suddenly out on Galveston Bay and a small pier at a 'locals only' park. Generally I manage to run the 1.5 miles to the pier, it's the 1.5 miles on the way home that I tend to walk. By the time I turn around, the Texas sun is in full swing and I have already killed my bottle of water. I give up and take it easy on the way home and get a good look around.


Private pier where the marsh meets the bay

Today I came across 6 bunnies at different spots nibbling happily on the shorter grass shoots trailside. Some would eye me cautiously as I ran by huffing and puffing, others turned and ran as if I would eat them on the spot, and the rest hopped just inside the tall grass about a foot away, as if I couldn't see them there. Occasionally I had to duck a spiderweb in order to avoid becoming some thing's SuperSized lunch special. And I think I saw a frog hopping throught he shallow marsh... it was either a frog or a really gleeful fish jumping high out of the water as it cruised upriver. It was really too far away to tell. I'd like ot think it was a frog. The thought of fish flying upriver kind of freaks me out. So if you take into account all the deer I've seen since I've been here, and the black and yellow toad I rescued from the toe-biting monster last night, I feel almost as if I've been living in the woods for a couple of weeks. It's truly a beautiful little pocket of wilderness/suburbia on the outskirts of Houston. Unfortunately, I've heard that they are opening a new shipping channel, and that within 10 years, these ports will be so busy that someting along the lines of 5,000 semis will pass through here a day. So much for peace and quiet and vibrant wildlife. I guess I'm thankful I got to spend some time here before it disappears.