On Bernhard Street

Several weeks ago I took a walk on Bernhard Street. I have posted photos of this area before. It is a 20 minute walk from home, pretty much the last row of houses at the top of Wildcat Canyon, where the back country and parkland meets civilization. It is in an unincorporated area, and therefore building codes may not be as stringent. Because the buildings exist in a multitude of styles, from little cottages to newer homes, somewhat derelict to recently stuccoed and spiffy. I can always see myself living here, though even with the money and assuming I could find a house that would fit all my books and a fenced yard that would keep hungry deer out of the gardens, I would not actually live there because it would be the first row of houses to meet their fate if a fire were to come roaring out of the canyon. Even before our fires of the past couple of years, and the current fires in Australia that are dominating my social media feed, I have always been afraid of fires, having be stuck on the wrong side of a fence with a fire approaching our property when I was little. No damage was done to property or me, but I still remember the terror.

Anyway, Bernhard Street is a great place for a winter stroll, because if you walk the entire street, you will have walked your 10,000 steps for sure, coming from my house down the hill.

Here is an aloe that was blooming on the way there:

And a randomly boarded fence. Sorry about the black lines, imaginary audience. This is because these photos were formatted for Instagram, which will otherwise insist on cutting off the edges of any photo that is longer than it is wide.  I do have a thing about random boards....

Bright moss on the shady side of a board fence:

Strange plant trunks up at the Gyuto Foundation, the Buddist temple that is at the beginning of Bernhard Street. Everyone is welcome on the property much of the time; I love to go up there and enjoy the proximity to the canyon behind it. They have even created a "path to enlightenment" where you can see a view of the canyon that has been closed to the public for years, except for the folks who live on that side. Since nature is my personal path to enlightenment, I find it doubly appropriate.

There is a lot of symbolism in the structures that I am not prepared to understand, but I love the details in this large golden medallion.

I am always fascinated by the row of prayer wheels. I don't spin them myself, but they have etherial music piped into the vicinity and I always want to take a photo of them receding into the distance.

This is the recently repainted front wall of the Temple. Since the afternoon sun was shining on it, it was just about this saturated with color.

Once back home I became fascinated with the two perspectives, prayer wheels and wall, each going off in a different direction. So I started combining them. The various color variations and value changes are due to interaction between layers in my ToolWiz photo editing program. Here are a few that I liked. Because the dots are white, they often act like a clear window leading back to the lower layer, making it stand out in a series of apparent mirrors.

Several blocks further down the street there is a house that is rumored to be made entirely of packing crate pieces, dating back to the 1960s maybe (??). I would say that it isn't occupied now, because all the street side windows seem to be boarded up, but I may be wrong, because there is certainly an actively maintained collection of brick wall dividers.

A little further lives a bottle tree:

And a really nicely textured leaf on the sidewalk. Not that anyone on this street seems to care, but I'm sure I look strange, walking along and then suddenly stopping and stooping, training my camera on something lying on the sidewalk.

Back in my own neighborhood, here is a side view mirror reflecting what shows from the open window on the other side of the truck. I love it when you can't tell what part is real.....kind of like life, eh?

And last, a photo of my "pregnant onion"'s flower stalk. I used to think this was a delicate houseplant, but now I know better, it grows like a weed in my backyard flowerpots. Be careful with it, however, it is apparently poisonous to cats. It's a good thing it's not a houseplant for me, because I didn't learn that until recently, and my cats will graze on anything green that comes into the house, in hopes that it is secretly cat grass or catnip.

'Das it.....I have several photo series that have been languishing; will try to remove the bottleneck in the next week or so.