moving in and up!

I have wanted to post this for a while now. Unfortunately, the only Internet we can get out here (read in the middle of nowhere) is satellite and our server is so poor that I'm having a heck of a time trying to edit photos. This is about the time I wish I had Photoshop! So I am really sorry at the poor quality of these photos. These are all prime examples of  SOOC (straight out of camera) photos at their best. :(.

I think I forgot to mention were we moved to in my last post. Well folks, we moved to Luray!

Yeah, as in Luray caverns. In fact, the caverns are only about a half hour drive from our front door and the Shenandoah national park is in our back yard and its river is accessible by a quite three mile walk down the road.

It’s funny I  say that because I remember thinking a three mile walk to the grocery store from our old apartment was a pain and "why not just drive". I like it here though. It gets me going and staying active. Pepper has even taken quite a liking to getting some fresh air. So much so that he cries to go out even once he’s been out all day! A big pulse does not have to use a leash or put him on a dog line like we did in our old apartment. There is so little commotion that he hardly has to use his leash (other than when we take the main road to the river or lake).

  I think he likes the freedom and I like that I have a dog that comes back when I call! It’s so immaculate here and every day I wake up to birds and the sound of God’s creation outside. No fake neon, over manicured lawns, no cars, ambulance, or police sirens in the distance (though the occasional gun firing is a little hard to get used to), no rude, polluted, time-natzied people running around and honking cars at you. No, just fresh air, ruffling leaves, birds singing, and the occasional deer calls and mooing across the river were a farm sits. I wake up to hazy mountains and fall to sleep under a sky of stars I never knew were there. And in a way, I feel closer to God and to how life 'should' be here. As though things like TV, twitters, fashion, and time have been bundled up into a wild mess of industrialization and thrown into a cesspool of city to leave the rest of God’s creation untouched. Untainted. Natural and almost holy in a sense. I think back at how hard people worked to make trees bloom in the winter and flowers to grow and grass to stay green and cover trees in lights. I look around now and see forests of brown lifeless trees. But they are more than that. They are like weaved baskets crossing between each other’s branches, leafless, so that for a short moment you can see the glory of nests and critters jumping about and chirping in once hidden branches. So that snow may lay on each tree like a blanket of white.

You can see the purpose of the leaflessness and you know that God did that on purpose and I know I am blessed.