{PHRF}: Impromptu hikes and Fairyland Real Estate

There are perks to summer Basketball Camps that are too short for me to drive all the way home and back again, but too long to wait in the parking lot.  What to do, what to do?  I discovered a park!  This trail was so wonderful.  And I ambled along enjoying the peace immensely.  Retreating to the peace, the reliable order of nature doing its summer thing.  It has been a week of troubled hearts,  political agendas, confronting, with frustration, the gnats of illogical thought, trying to apply Eternal Moral Truths to the glaring worldliness around me....unrest, fear, a little bit of dread for the future.  But today, peace.  Green, growing, sunshiny, dependable peace.  It brings to mind a poem that I memorized long ago.  I love this poem.  It transports me to a place that is PRETTY, HAPPY, and REAL in the best sense.  And the FUNNY?  Well, I came across some very fine "fairyland real estate" on my walk.  The kind of places I loved as a little girl.  The kind of places where fairies and gnomes might just take up residence.  It was silly I suppose, but for an hour it was lovely.  

"When from our better selves we have too long

Been parted by the hurrying world,

And droop, sick of its business, of its pleasures

tired - how gracious, how benign is solitude."

William Wordsworth

Some mushrooms are fascinating, frightful, eerie, and funny all at the same time.  This one even had green shoots sprouting from it.  

Creative Child, who dabbles in astronomically "everything", noted that on this particular day at his workplace the sunlight seemed reddish.  When we went back to see these pictures from my hike, the sun splashes were also red.  That evening the moon we gazed up at from the back porch was red.  A phenomenon probably explained by the humid haze that dominates our Midwest city during this time of the summer.  But it was a beautiful red. 

A fairy staircase 

A hidden Gnome door behind the leaves.  Okay, only a rotten dark log, but for a moment it felt mysteriously possible.  

A Gnome Home if I ever saw one!

A particularly lovely fairy mansion!

Thanks for indulging my fancies.  I haven't gone off my rocker with the fairies and the gnomes, I promise.