M R Fish. C M Gills?

For the second Friday in a row, Dear Husband and I decided to treat ourselves to a dinner date. Last week we ate fast-food Chinese, watched Mr. Holmes in the theater, and had Blizzards for dessert. This week I managed to get out of the hospital early enough for us to beat the dinner rush and score a booth at the hottest BBQ place in town. The service was so fast that we had over an hour until we could pick up our tickets to the closing-night performance of Hay Fever by Noel Coward at one of the community theaters in town. So we decided to take a walk. Along the way, we discovered some new public artwork and walked the length of the newest stretch Boneyard Creek path.

The landscaped walkway is a definite improvement over the stark concrete culvert that used to cut through the northern part of downtown. The wheelchair-accessible concrete path winds along under bridges and behind one of the nicest restaurants in town, which has built a wooden deck overlooking the now-babbling brook.

At one end there is a sort of small amphitheater. The concrete walls are now decorated with patterns, one of which looks like crawfish. We didn't see any of those in the water, but we did see a bunch of fish, including one unmistakable pet-variety goldfish, a duck, and a bicycle tire, probably courtesy of all the rain we've had this summer.

This part of the path is still pretty short, so we had enough time to sit by the water and relax. It was the longest time we had spent awake together all week. DH read in the massive tome he's working on by Will Durant, and I composed this blog post. You'll have to imagine the sound of the gurgling water, the trees full of cicadas, and the muffled traffic. We didn't chance upon any mountain lions, at least not the live variety.

Western Mountain Lion, Tim Summerville (2015)