We get just enough Winter in our part of north Texas that we may say we have four seasons. Saturday proved to be one of those "bragging rights" days, winter-wise. I donned layer upon layer of clothing to go for a hike on the Trinity Trail.
The Trinity Trail has a trailhead about twenty minutes' drive from my home, in the town of Lucas. Lucas is not what you would ordinarily call a town if you drove through it. It is a series of small ranches and patches of acreage, as well as some housing developments. It's gorgeous, in its own way, stark flatland punctuated by cedar trees, small creeks, and grassland.
Trinity Trail runs nine miles along Lake Lavon. On my way to the trailhead, I saw a coyote wandering along the road. This coyote looked the way coyotes should look--jaunty, attractive and suitably bantamweight. I loved the hues of his gray fur, and the bushy look of his tail. We gazed at one another as he headed off in the nearby field.
The trailhead features all sorts of things having to do with horses, as the trail is widely used by horsepeople, who get tremendous credit for getting the Corps of Engineers to set aside the trail for such uses. It's also open to hikers.
On a Summer day, a half dozen horse trailers greet one in the parking lot. Saturday I had the trail nearly to myself.
In contrast to the flower/leaf/tallgrass opulence of my last visit, Trinity Trail settled into an appealing winter darktone mood, punctuated by the oh-so-green ambience of the small cedars. A surprising number of birds sang and flitted from metaphoric "here" to metaphoric "there". They rested on trees bare of leaves and on cedars.
During the first part of my hike, the wind grazed my scarves and made little indentations of cold on my cheeks. Within moments, I was used to the cold, and able to enjoy the stark scenery.
The trail features little location signs, which result from an Eagle Scout's final project. The sign "Hiker's Point" strikes me as appropriate, as I often turn around there to return to my car. This point features a little traillet which runs down to the waterline on Lake Lavon. The drought, though, places the waterline 16 feet below where it should be located. The result is a lakebed, which surprisingly has a small road. The road is usually submerged, but yesterday I walked it to experience once again the plant life in what was once lake.
During the Summer, I made a video, in which I walked this same lakebed amid tiny flowers, butterflies, and tall weeds. Yesterday my walk featured instead the darker colors of departed plants where once the green had been.
I enjoyed the walk immensely, and then I drove to a new Vietnamese place in Plano, Pho Mac, to enjoy shrimp spring rolls and pho ga.
In the evening, our friends Scott and Donna came over, and we all ate green salad with a wonderful simple mint sauce. The mint sauce was the same liquid mint that one places upon lamb, but it tasted really good atop mandarin oranges and greens. For our main course, we had a low-fat chili my wife had made. I dessert-splurged a bit, calorie-wise, on a piece of brownie pie which Donna had made.
We followed up the meal with a trip to the Angelika Plano cinema, where we enjoyed the movie "For Your Consideration". Although there were fewer "falling on the floor laughing" jokes than the usual Christopher Guest mockumentary, I preferred this film even to the wonderful "Best in Show". I like any movie in which Parker Posey pleasingly performs profusely, picture-prominently and photogenically.
We made an early evening of things, and were better for the experience.