Mesa Trail ch. 13
Draft 2

Later that day, Hannah had assembled all of the ingredients for her next recipe on the kitchen table and couldn't seem to get the image of the turtle that Inuna released into the Bear Canyon Creek out of her mind.  What an expedition for any creature, to be picked out of one familiar place, walked up the side of an unknown mountain, then released into new waters all alone, left to navigate little obstacles along the way.  The turtle, who she was calling Diver, after the fact that it seemed to dive right from the hands of Inuna when she placed it at the swiftly moving shoreline, might now have stopped somewhere along the way in some remote quiet area of the forest or had he bounced along the rocks gulping where he needed all to the bottom of the mountain at the same resevoir where he was found in the first place.  She had already designated Kitie and Josh for their dinner time posts – Josh already skinning the red potatoes and carefully mandolining them into thin slices, add a pinch of salt and olive oil, "we will then bake them until crisp then splash with pesto." Hannah was always a little bit careful not to be too commanding when cooking, but she also knew that no direction meant no food. "Pesto," Josh had garbled back, "isn't that the green slimy stuff?"

"Trust me, it will be added to the potatoes. They are dull otherwise. Besides, its fun."  She rolled a couple of potatoes in her hand under running water. The sun had already ducked out of sight below the red rocks outside. Before Hannah had decided to be a gold miner and treasure hunter in the foothills of Rockies, she had apprenticed, somewhat unknowingly, in an up and coming bistro off the Wharf in Seattle, where dad was getting his final degree in environmental sciences and mom was teaching night courses at Seattle Tech.  The strange and earthy smells of the Luminous Lemon Bistro was run by a fifty-five year old woman who had finally given up her job as a stay at home mother to cook all day and let those sweet smells of the northwest finagle the noses along the streets into the Bistro.  It was Hannah's job to go around to the fresh producers of the city and gather ingredients and bring them back to Claire at the Luminous, where they would together talk over the menu.  It was Claire's intention to add lemon to every dish that they offered customers, whether they knew it or not, and hence idea of Luminous, as in bright, tangy, wishful.  The pesto on the potatoes, Hannah thought, could use one last squirt of lemon at the end, but that would come later.  Mom and dad would both be working well into the night tonight.  Hannah had a written plan.  Clean the house, cook, clean the house again, homework, plan out tomorrow's mining operation and consider, as she did those things, the menu for the next night.  In a flash she could see her own restaurant someday located right down the street from their house at Settler's Park. It would be called Element 79, and her own luminous contribution – like Claire's lemons – would be flecks of gold in the plates and the glasses.  She could only hope nobody would steal all the dinnerware.  "Kitie, you are in charge of the plates and silverware tonight.  Be careful with them, we don't have any to spare." Somewhere out there under the wild blue sky Diver curled up under the protection of a fallen aspen limb overhanging the bank of the creek, his green shell glittering with gold flakes.