Pines On My Mind

Ponderosa Pines with the San Francisco Peaks on the background

Well, I've done it. I've changed my blog name. It's something that I should have done long ago, but just never got around to doing because I thought that it would be this daunting process that would fully expose my ineptitude in all things tech. Turns out I just went into my settings, picked a new name, and hit the Save button. I'm glad no one else had this name already, which I was a little surprised by. Normally I don't see myself as being the first to think of anything creative, as creativity is often times a huge struggle for me.

Sunset through the pines

So, a little back story. I originally came up with the title Eat. Poop. Live. as a play on the book Eat. Pray. Love. I felt that my title represented me pretty well, as I love to eat, I've been known for years as a person who talks far more than she should about poop, and I'm all about getting out there and living your life. Pretty perfect, right? Not so much when you string those words together in a sentence with no other context.

Snow on the Pines

It was just over a year ago that my friend Colton drove to Flagstaff from Arkansas to visit Simon and I. We had a great time tooling around northern Arizona, showing him all that things that we love so much about living out here. It came up at one point that I had a blog. Colton wanted to read it, so I texted him the URL of the blog so he could find it. He texted me back not long after, wanting to make sure that I had actually sent him the right blog address, and that he wasn't going to end up on some site where people were eating poop, live on camera.

Home sweet home, surrounded by Ponderosas

I was horrified. How had I NEVER noticed that? How had I NEVER even thought about it? Seriously...me, the poop talker. To my credit, the subject of anyone eating poop very rarely comes up in my poop musings because that's just gross. No one should be eating poop. However, there is a subculture out there who do, and to each their own, but I was pretty disgusted and embarrassed to be linked to them in any way, shape, or form.

Getting ready to ride into the pines

So yeah...Eat. Poop. Live. had to go. Now that I'm 40 and feel like an actual adult (mostly), it seems like a good time to make the change. I've been thinking about it the last few weeks, and truth be told, it's hard to come up with a short little phrase to describe yourself that is both catchy and representative. Some of my favorite blog titles of blogs that I frequent: Bits of Sunshine, Pinch of Yum, Minimal Effort; to name a few. I feel like each of these blog titles represents their authors or what they're trying to convey in their blogs, and that's something I wanted too.

Rainbows, Ponderosas, Grand Canyon...do I really live here???

So why Pines On My Mind? Well, for starters, I live in the largest Ponderosa Pine forest on the planet. They are everywhere. I see them everyday, I interact with them in some way each and every day; they have become a consistent part of my life, and one that I'm mostly grateful to have. I love being out in the middle of the woods and taking a moment to be quiet, to listen to the sound of the wind through the trees. There's something very unique sounding about wind through pines. On a warm day, if you get close and smell the bark of a Ponderosa on the sunny side, you're met with the faint scent of caramel and vanilla. Sometimes in the summer on really warm days the whole forest smells like that. Some Ponderosas are tall and spindly, some are bushy, some are gnarly...there's a lot of variety in how they look. They are the welcome sign when we are driving up from Phoenix, letting us know that we are almost to 7,000 feet of elevation and are almost home. They can be fragile, in that they grow in rocky soil and sometimes have difficulty putting down deep roots, and are sometimes blown over by the very wind that we enjoy hearing so much. We recently had to have the biggest Ponderosa on our property removed after it blew over in a wind storm. It's sad to look out into the back yard now, seeing the stump; it's all that remains of what used to be a big, beautiful tree. What Ponderosas might lack in a root system they make up for in resilience, surviving wind, forest fires, snow, rain, heat, bugs. There are dead Ponderosa skeletons dotting the forest, looking both spooky and regal at the same time. In the fall and spring the needles that they drop all over everything are the bane of my existence. I didn't think anything could be worse than raking oak leaves. I was mistaken. They're pokey, they're sappy, and they nearly destroy any sort of lawn bag you try to put them in.

Pine viewing from the hammock

These pines...they're a part of me now, and I found it fitting to include them in my blog, which is a part of me that I share with you.