When Spring Comes

Spring in the Potomac Highlands is a wonderful experience. I get itchy feet and want to toddle around constantly with my camera and share my point of view with everyone that I know.  Mostly, I like photography for selfish reasons in that I like to practice drawing from the photographs.  My photos become my inspiration for other works of art.  Sometimes I use my photography for altruistic reasons because I know so many folks that suffer from seasonal depression.  I just want to share the amusement and beauty of the world that I see and what is more fun than bug love on a blossom.
I have tried to go for a hike without my camera but I just feel lost without it. So, it has become part of my hiking attire.  It is the same with my dopey dawg, Chloe.  She is my hiking partner.  I adopted Chloe as a rescued & quite pathetic mess from a puppy mill.  She was about 3 or 4 years old and had never been out of a breeder cage and had no understanding of the world around her.

 At first, I thought she was blind because she constantly ran into tables or chair legs but she just never developed any sense of space.
She was terrified of everything including ceiling fans, dog toys, leashes, walking sticks, and any sounds.  I was her last hope because the rescuers had decided that she was not adoptable.    It took several months of patience and we started going for little walks.  I will never forget the first time she broke into a joyous romp in the grass. She had finally managed to coordinate her front end and back end in a weird pacer type of run and from that point on it was "game on" for her and she became my hiking partner.

So, every spring we start our day with a little 1 or 2 mile morning hike up or around our mountain. Sometimes we go to a park for a hike around the lake or to find a new waterfall or just a new trail. I enjoy toddling around the mountains with my camera and my dopey dawg all year long but especially in spring.  We hike around the highlands until we get snowed in and are forced to hike around the mountain again. We always see something wonderful where ever we go.