Hardiman doesn't often open the T-o-t-D threads so I will share what he has often told me.

When Hardiman was a young boy he lived in a tough neighborhood on Chicago's south side where the steel industry was enjoying its last gasp. Long THE employer of his particular area, steel was dwindling now and the income no longer supported the healthy function of the neighborhood. But Hardiman's family stayed, as the emptying mills began rotting to rust one by one... as the good men who'd poured their lives into our steel got older and more and more bitter... and his family stayed, and stayed awhile longer, as the area exchanged ethnic groups and the neighbors they'd known for years fled.

One of Hardiman's particular pleasures was to walk along the rail bed. It became his custom, from a very young age, to enjoy the diamonds glinting from the ground on sunny days. "Diamonds?" I asked him when he first told me this. "Well," he said, "it depends on how you choose to see things. I guess it was just broken glass. But it was the prettiest thing to look at, so that's what I looked at."

Hardiman grew up with a love of the natural setting that leaves him in perpetual wonder at mountains, forests, and open spaces. He's the best camper I know and is completely at home anywhere.

Now we live on the edge of a working hardscrabble dairy farm, renting the house that used to house the owners and later housed the tenant farmers and their hands. In this season we are surrounded by the odor of melting manure spread on the field last fall to nourish the fragile topsoil. And each evening, early, if you look out back at just the right place, at just the right time, the deer come down the hill behind the house and cross the pasture on their way to the water flowing all around us.

It's still a choice, what to notice in the day.

~Susan~