I am not very good at maintaining connections with old friends.  As my life took me different places from them, I tended to go on with the new current life and friends.  I did not like the feeling of missing old friends, so I focused away from that.

A best friend from my boyhood through college days found me (through this website actually) and invited my wife and me to visit him.  It was a short visit... to short.  It has triggered a whole slew of memories that I want to share with him, and his memories with me.

High School Reunions never appealed to me.  This was different.  He has a very different life now than when we last saw each other 35 years ago.  I was fascinated to see all the things that have become important to him now.  He is very active in his community, a small town on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.  Every one seems to know each other there.    He does volunteer work, and he is part of the township management.

Community closeness like that is one of the draws that bring me back to work for the National Park Service each year.  The folks who work in the park tend to think of everyone as family.  That never happened to me in my corporate career.  My friend’s associations with neighbors, local politics, and local businesses are very appealing to me.

Another attraction for me to going back to the park each year is the closeness of wildlife.  White-tailed deer, American black bears, ground hogs, skunks, red-shouldered hawks have all been visitors to the yard outside my quarters up on the mountain.  That is quite a change from my suburban permanent home outside Washington, DC.  There are typical songbirds drawn to me suburban yard by feeders.  An occasional cotton-tailed rabbit nibbles on my grass or a night-time raccoon will wander into the yard raiding trashcans in the night, but other than that, it is quite civilized around my permanent home compared with my seasonal mountain quarters.  My wife even talked about that to my reunion friend during our visit with him and his wife.  Ann described the wonder felt as a bear with four cubs walked within ten feet of our cabin door.

Just as we arrived back home from our visit, around 5:30 p.m., an uncommon, but not impossible event happened.  We have lived at this address for 32 years without ever seeing this happen.   A wild animal was walking down our suburban street with houses on both sides every fifty-five feet of curb.  There was a red fox loping down the grass yards past us.  I have learned on the mountain that I should always keep the camera with the telephoto lens at the ready.  This time it was in my car, so here is the evidence that yep, it is a red fox.