The Caregiver’s Tales: A Blog

The Two Day Two City Tour 2026 is in the books. Life on the road is a grind, and I’m glad to be home, he said with tongue firmly in cheek. Yesterday’s event was held inside because of rain with no amplification, which meant I didn’t get to use my new tremolo pedal, but it felt just like home because mostly I play in picker’s circles in people’s front rooms.

Day one of the 2026 Two Day Two City Tour (TDTCT) is over. My friend Rob McDonald joined me on stage at Folkfest in New Braunfels to replace the friend David Pagan originally planned. David threw out his back. The three of us make up a group when we play together that we’ve come to call the Withered Roots, because we’re all old. Yesterday’s show went on without much of a hitch and we even had a good crowd, mostly made up of friends, but there were some strangers who stuck around to hear us play and sing.

We’ve had days of rain and might have a few more. But the creek beds are still dry, and the lake levels low so no one’s celebrating. I think the storm to turn that tide will have to be epic, and even then, it might still fall short. Methinks it will be hard to overcome decreased rainfall and a population of thirty million people who like to drink water. That’s a lot of straws in the aquifer, and more are coming every day.

I stood on the porch yesterday and watched the rain start to fall. The leaf litter on the drive twitched with memories of life as the raindrops fell until the drops became a torrent and the leaves began to float. Then they huddled together to begin their journey to becoming organic matter, sending nutrients back to the parental trees who once bore them, decaying into a new life. A virtuous cycle.

It’s nice when you can get back to nature by simply walking into your yard. I suppose it’s nice to have a yard. Lots of people don’t and some that do, don’t really care that much about getting back to nature in them. It’s mostly ornamentation. But I’ve always found refuge in my yards. It was me and my plants, and it was fairly easy to figure out their wants and desires and keep them mostly happy.

Thoreau wrote about his trips down the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, Twain wrote about the Mississippi, John Graves said goodbye to the Brazos. It seems we’re always saying goodbye to our rivers as they ran in their natural states before industrialization and civilization swallows them whole. I feel fortunate to have canoed the Guadalupe in an almost natural state in the 1970s before it became a lazy river with wall-to-wall tubers.

I finished the documentary about Henry David Thoreau last night. I may have to go back and reread his work. I first encountered Thoreau in high school with Emerson, but they were simply characters in a parade of characters as we marched through the history of US literature and philosophy.  I don’t recall reading On Walden Pond or Civil Disobedience, but I probably read parts of them. Most of it, like thoughts on transcendentalism, simply became part of my patchwork quilt of a brain.

I’ve spent several days in the last week talking about truth spurred by a documentary on Thoreau and his search for truth. Then I spent this weekend confronting my own truth. I’m dying, not in a specific way such as a horrific diagnosis, just in the general way that everyone dies. Time is running out. I’m entering my eighties, and for the first time, when thinking about a tree to plant, I realized I might not see it through to maturity. That’s a sobering thought.