A New Tambourine

Hey there, Steve -

Per ________'s suggestion, I am looking to possibly buy a new tambourine.  I'm wondering if you have any fave ones that you could recommend.

I'm emailing you at the eleventh hour as, if I am going to buy it, I have to make this purchase today.  (Sorry for the late notice.)  Your input will be greatly appreciated.

Hi ____________!

As it happens, I know nothing about tambourines!  In fact, until today, I don't think I have ever typed the word. 

It does remind me, that once, during a long, solitary hike in the wintertime, in Iroquois County alongside Sugar Creek trying to track down a red fox from it's tracks, the word tambourine entered my mind for a moment.  Almost at the same time I slipped on some ice on the riverbank, left over from the river overflowing its banks in the late fall and freezing there.  I sometimes wonder if I experienced a small, insignificant stroke or perhaps was slightly dehydrated since the word, until today, has not since reentered my mind.  But I did not fall, which might have caused a bit of a problem, because I was miles from home, or miles away from anywhere for that matter, the river being flanked by hundreds of acres of dormant farm land.  At the time, I was interested in documenting the return of mammals, like beaver, to the county, and owls.  You see, the county was one of the subject counties which were written about in depressing detail by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring published in 1958, my birth year.  I was little when we moved there, just after the whole land was sprayed with DDT to halt the progress of some kind of invasive insect, and the resulting ecological unraveling formed part of my outdoor experience.  As a budding teen-aged naturalist, I noticed when the recovery started, and as an environmental science student in college I often wondered if anyone else noticed that Mother Nature was doing her best to restore the order so horribly disrupted.  Sadly, I no longer have any good reasons to return to witness the changes that must be occurring.  I wonder if anyone else has experienced seeing a red fox, contrasted against a brilliant white snowbank, as I did many years ago.  A red fox occupying an abandoned niche for the first time in decades and serving as a witness to the power of Mother Nature to correct the multitudes of insults we cause.  It gives me hope.

And I hope you get a nice new tambourine.

Steve