Jazz & I explore the mountain stream

I love the movement of water and was trying to capture it in these pics. Ever since reading Hinds Feet on High Places I've tried to find the song in the waters of streams and rivers.

Water has always had a calming affect on me ever since I was little. It probably started from playing in water/mud puddles in my swimsuit in the front of the house after it rained. I spent my first 6 years living on the Naval Academy Dairy Farm in Gambrills, MD where life was secluded and safe. When I moved to Cape St. Claire there was a lake in the back of the property where daddy built a pier and we kept our row boats for crabbing and fishing. Unfortunately the lake was not one you could swim in and desperately needed dredging but there were rare swamp (okay so the lake had turned into a swamp) grasses and the dredging couldn't be done. Oh on a hot sultry August day you could smell the swamp for miles! There were muskrats, snakes, turtles and eventually a heron came to roost in the lake/swamp of Lake Claire.

But the upside is that only a block away was the beach which emptied into Lake Claire. After taking years of Red Cross swimming lessons I was allowed to go to the beach alone or with my friends to swim. Occasionally we would swim around the channel markers but there was stuff swimming in there that we couldn't see and that just grosses a girl out so we only did that when we wanted to show off our swimming prowess (ok it was only twice). Swimming through the seaweed was squeamish enough without the thought of eels swimming beside you...yuck! It was a place you could go to and think and all the worries seemed to float away with the outgoing tide. I loved that place. Unfortunately they have since built houses that no longer allow access to the beach that my family, friends & I enjoyed so much.

All of that was preparation for the mountain pics in Ille's backyard where Jazz & I went exploring one afternoon. The water was cool but not obnoxiously cold and we walked, splashed & slid around and in general had fun. One day I'm going to make a landscape quilt using all the pics I've taken for inspiration.