Dog Walk

I drive up to Fort Collins from Denver twice a week these days to help my sister Susan out with chores (driving to the grocery store, the library, the beauty parlor, etc.), and one of my duties is to take her dog Blackberry out for a walk (her other dog, Tutu, is a Yorkie that refuses to go out in the cold). Blackberry seems to love the cold, however, and when we leave the house runs as fast as she can to the green space around the apartment complex across the street.  There are evidently wonderful smells over there, and it is almost impossible to get her to go back home.  I took the photograph on the left of her while she was looking back at me, wondering why I was not moving forward in the quest for new smells.

Yesterday, on the first part of the walk, we passed the entrance to the farm next door.  At least it used to be a farm.  My sister tells me it belongs to an older couple who retired from farming but still live there, and who kept an entire square block of land that is now simply prairie that attracts wild turkeys, deer, foxes, and untold numbers of birds.  It is a very pleasant open space right in the middle of a residential area.  It is a great place to walk and get an idea of what the area looked like before it was developed. However, I would not want to be the one to have to pay the property taxes on it.  I imagine when that couple sold the rest of the land to developers, they must have gotten enough to maintain the rest of the grounds during their retirement.  A win-win, as we say in the business world,  for both them and the surrounding neighbors.