Last year, we encountered this delightful building. It is a nondenominational chapel and is located along Route 1 in the unincorporated community of Sea Ranch, in Sonoma county. It is open to the public every day and is an inspiring place to meditate, contemplate or pray. It is emblematic of northern California. A local told us about the place and we visited it on our way out of town. It has the look and feel of something out of Middle Earth and feels totally organic, without hardly any straight lines or right angles to be found.
This morning, we walked in Tower Grove Park. This park has hundreds of varieties of different trees and is wonderfully shady on hot and sultry summer days. There are a number of tree circles within the park and we observed a woman doing Tai Chi within one of these tree-henges. She looked spiritual while performing her stylized martial exercises.
Another group of people were getting a vigorous workout. There are a set of tennis courts in the park that we pass by every time that we walk there, but today I noticed something odd about some of them. They were smaller than a regulation tennis court. It turns out that they are pickleball courts. Pickleball is a mashup of tennis, badminton, and ping-pong. A Sixties invention, the game uses something like a wiffleball and ping-pong paddles for play. It was invented by a father who while trying to entertain his bored children hit upon this novel game, when he couldn’t find their family badminton racquets and shuttlecock.
Around town, Forest Park with all of its attractions like the museums and the zoo, is also-known-as the front yard of Saint Louis, while Tower Grove Park, with its smaller and more intimate venues is known as the town’s backyard. On this holiday weekend, with everything else that is going on this year, staying home, in the backyard seems to be the thing to do. Speaking of yards, ours could use a little love and feeding this weekend too.