Red Camo

I extracted myself from this morning's Town commitments to stay home and finish, package and post a bunch of books for the Association of Book Crafts table at the Heart of Art Festival in Parnell, Auckland this weekend. That done, I couldn't resist the call of the sunshine and went for a long walk (3+ hours).

I was dressed all in red, because all my other more subdued walking clothes are drying on the line (I inevitably come home covered in mud or dust, depending on the weather) which had the advantage of (hopefully) making me look very unlike a duck. Not that I heard any hunters in the middle of this Monday afternoon, but better safe than sorry.

I headed up to 'the grandfathers', three trees on a hill top that I love to visit. The track up there has been chewed down by the big herd of calves grazing that paddock, which makes it much easier to walk through. Of course the price paid was that the grass under the trees, where I like to sit and contemplate the hills rolling out from me to the distant coast (imagined over the horizon) was liberally dotted with juicy cow pats.

So I carried on, up into the bush and then through a gate labeled "Kiwi Zone" and into the pines. There were hundreds of red toadstools, straight out of Enid Blighton illustrations. I stopped to take photos of the prettiest ones but then started laughing because there were just so many like a giant paintbrush had splattered vermilion through the forest. And there I was, another splash of red moving among them, in camoflage.