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Friday, April 08, 2016

El Dorado State Park

I was in El Dorado, a town of about 13,000 people in central Kansas, recently for a wedding. El Dorado is known primarily for its community college, its oil refinery, and its lake.

Both the wedding and reception were held outside on that Saturday. The bride and groom didn’t anticipate a change in the weather because it started getting really cold and windy during the reception. Although no snow was in the forecast, it snowed a couple of inches on that Sunday morning. There are remnants of the snow in some of the pictures I have posted.

On that Sunday, my wife and I stopped at El Dorado State Park. One of my wife’s sisters had her family scatter her ashes at the lake almost eight years ago. In memory of her sister, my wife placed carnations, her sister’s favorite flower, on the water.

Not having visited this lake before, I was pleased with its size and its peacefulness. It was the best part of the trip actually. It was too early in the season for boats to disturb the quiet or for other people to congregate near the picnic tables. A part of the lake adjoins the interstate, and I was only familiar with the part of the lake that contains drowned trees, their bare limbs sticking out of the water like antlers.

My wife reminded me on the trip back home that she wants her ashes scattered on the Flint Hills. She has designated a mile marker on the highway that looks onto the valley she wants to make her final resting place, approximately somewhere between Olpe and Madison. I haven’t yet decided what I want done with my body or my ashes when I die.






Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Sunset Picture Taken With a Phone

I managed to capture this picture of the sunset on my phone and wanted to share it despite the amount of noise in the picture.