In response to timt347: I bought this bit of acreage (2.5 acres) in 1962, when I was 19. There was a typical Oregon coast beach shack on it, the original 20x20 cabin built 30 years earlier, with a bedroom and two garages shedded onto it...first garage was, at that point, a large dark "shop" area with a newly-installed old toilet at the back corner. (That owner had, ta da, added both electricity and water by having a well drilled.) Dad had always loved the coast, worked hard as a self-employed house painter in spite of having shattered five vertebrae in his back at age 64, and here was an affordable bit of forest not too far from the ocean. I had a really great job that paid extremely well, so I bought the place and gave it to Dad (my parents). In retrospect, I should have given them lifetime tenancy on the place...long after Dad died, so did Mom, and she left it, 50/50 to me and my very rich sister who lives in GA. It cost me $250,000 to buy her half. I paid that mortgage off years ago, so live here full time at little expense, other than all the work of keeping the land and house in shape. I also have the money from selling the house I had owned for 40 years in Portland, two hours northeast, plus great Social Security, so I bank $500 or more most months. Better yet, although the City annexed most of this area in 2013, they couldn't include acreages in the annexation as we would have prevented the necessary triple majority, so we're in the county, paying a quarter of what we'd have to pay if we'd been annexed. The downside is that the lovely little creek that attracted me to buying this place is now a huge ugly marsh; my driveway's flooded off and on all winter, this being the 15th year. Still when I mowing the little 500x10-50 strip of grass out by the one-lane gravel road, people stop to tell me how beautiful the land is: it sweeps up a steep hillside into the deep old-growth spruce forest. "My" deer herd is often just outside my 6' office window; sometimes the entire local herd of 40 elk is in that side yard. So, in spite of the need to put on knee boots or chest waders to get out to the road and my car all winter, I love this bit of land and am forever glad that I bought it...twice!

And sometimes it's the window of a bus ... as yesterday on way back from grocery shopping ... as afternoon sun streamed its rays on earth in the lazy wayward company of white clouds.

Still other times it's the window of my imagination. I mean reading the NY Times coverage of galaxies forming and moving away for ever at ever greater speeds is enough for me to get lost (drunk?) on the stunning mystery of it all if only momentarily.