I'm still here

It's been a few weeks since my last post but I have excuses. Good excuses.  One, our granddaughter arrived for a 2+ week stay and then my sister and brother in law arrived for a much anticipated visit. Even during the best of times, I am not a good communicator. And this was one of the best of times and I tried, but failed. But, it is a new week and I can attempt to do better. And that I will do...

It has been more than two weeks since the first of June and Summer is upon us...sort of. We haven't had a lot of hot days. We might have had one day where the temp exceeded 100 degrees. I am not a good 'gauger' of temps anymore and with a dependable AC unit in place, we keep the temp inside at 79 degrees and I am rarely outside. I do enjoy going out onto the patio as a breeze seems to whisper through there most days and the scenery is lovely at this time of year. Flowers are everywhere and the greens are greener than at most times. But, we have been told that this is an "El Ni~no" year which seems to mean nothing specific, as it all depends on where you live. We are located near the dividing line of Northern and Southern California and that means we will see a hot summer or a cool summer, a wet winter or a dry winter. And that is as accurate as as it gets.

Above is a bit of memoribilia that I discovered awhile ago while browsing. The story behind it begins in 1945 and that is when we had moved to Manhattan Beach and I had begun to explore my new surroundings. Part of those suroundings were the immense sand dunes that were on every vista of our little beach cottage on Pacific Ave. 

I had to explore those dunes so off I went to climb to the top, and almost at the top I saw a locked door to some sort of cave; truth was, it was 4 caves. And along a leveled off portion of the dunes there were small tracks, like you might find in a mine, and the tracks ran from one door to the next. I walked along that line of blank doors and found the last one was unlocked and open. It was dark in there and so I didn't go inside, although there was just enough light to see that there was nothing in there.

The caves had lost their appeal for me. Still, every once in awhile I would look again to see if anything had changed. It was always the same, until one day I saw that every door was open and some had been removed. I looked into all of them but there was nothing in them? The next time I came by, the tracks had been removed. The time after that, the caves had disappeared altogther. Over time they became a memory...until I ran across these government drawings.  

These days, even the dunes are a memory as Manhattan Beach sold all of the sand. Some of it even went as far as Waikiki Beach where it replenished the sands of that tropical isle.