Waiters sometimes say, as they serve the next course during a leisurely meal in France, “bonne continuation” wishing the diner to enjoy the next course. After a pause between courses, I am continuing to write about life’s adventures. It has been just over a month ago since I bid a reluctant farewell to Paris, landed back in Sahuarita, unpacked, put away, and began repacking for the journey to Oregon. And once again, bags and boxes are unpacked and I’m settled in a chalet at the Running Y Ranch Resort in Klamath Falls, Oregon until the first of November.

The new cover picture is one I took of the entrance to this multi-use community west of Klamath Falls. It is mostly a wooded area, surrounding a golf course and edging Klamath Lake on several sides. It used to be known as the Disney Ranch because Walt Disney’s brother Roy is one of several people who have owned the 3600 acres that constitute the resort and another 9600 acres of surrounding ranch land. There are some beautiful custom homes out here as well as town homes, chalets, a resort hotel, several restaurants, a little grocery store, a spa facility and many outdoor amenities for those who wish to ride horses, hike, kayak, zip line, ice skate, play pickleball or tennis, or are birders. There are miles of walking paths and trails and that’s my activity of choice along with sitting on the deck that overlooks the lake and is surrounded by trees and birds, and writing about it all. Rachael Hallinan changed up the front page yesterday and we’ll make another change as the leaves tell us summer turned to autumn, which always seems to happen suddenly sometime in September.

This is the land where I grew up on a farm south of town, played the organ for several churches, participated in 4-H clubs and Girl Scouts and Job’s Daughters, rode my old horse Prince in the 4th of July parade and the rodeo grand parade surrounded by contemporaries many of whom began first grade and graduated high school together and now live here as retirees. I have yet to go to the grocery store and not run into someone I know…and find myself repeating a pattern learned as a young teenager coming to town to grocery shop with my Mother. One day we ran into some of her friends from town, one of whom was shopping with her teenage daughter, a junior high school student in the city school. I, of course, wore jeans and probably a fashionable plaid shirt. This young teen said to her mother with a disparaging voice, “I would not be caught DEAD wearing jeans in town.” Oh brother, that stuck. That was in the 50’s. My vanity lives on today…a trip to the grocery store involves makeup and a “put together” outfit…jeans, yes, but the ensemble must work!! Seriously…the ring of that comment plays itself in my subconscious both here AND in Arizona sixty plus years later. There is a complex dichotomy in my psyche between the farm girl who still loves dirt and cattle grazing in fields and the lady who loves life in a city surrounded by museums and art galleries and formal gardens and fine restaurants, opera, symphony, and theatre…a plaid of a different sort that you will see unfold in summer stories as Brightly She Goes back to the scene of her naissance.