photo

I'm thinking I need to just post photos, maybe even one a day, to establish (reestablish) a feeling of...what is it? That sense of making coherence out of whatever else it all may seem to be. Here is what the Deerfield River valley feels like these days:

And a wider view:

After a winter that pretty much, juggernaut-style, crushed all of us, things are growing again.

Salvation.

Snow

The wind blew and blew and the fire crackled and the snows poured down and down.

more pics from cali

I manage to post photos only from California. It's been the usual lovely.

Shards of sharpest green and light to pierce you through --

And fambam that makes me laugh in a good-good way --

Hard not to love your life.

Halloween

We walked the streets and breathed the chill air of this liminal time (when, Scandinavians thought, we're brought closest to a touching-place that connects us with the world of the dead). Hazel dressed in black-ballerina-mouse.

And we walked out into the gathering dark, beneath a cloud-cover that's been almost permanent this whole fall, except when it's lifted (and those long glorious fingers of gold and burnished October light reach east to the near-naked hills, but can't touch the dark cold shadow-bound river on its far flank). There's an unpainted old house along Main -- dozens, really -- but one that masses on its stoop a curious bounty of gargantuan beauties.

And then the forge --

And that house across the street, every year itself a big grinning warmth.

Oh, California!

Hazel and my mom and I flew out to California back in late June. Summer feels like it's on the wane now -- the photos help me hang on.

Put that in your pipe, Mr. Burns

We're eating big American burgers at an oversized, lots-of-leather-and rough-wood-all-over sort of joint, and Hazel asks, "How many people won the Civil War?" Good question. That's the first art, right? Asking good questions.

Virgin forest, Ohio

Why do they have to call it that? I know, I know -- but come on. Here are a set of images from an outing the folks and Hazel and I took back on July 3 (anniversary of Taylor's death) -- down near Wooster where there's a tract of land (not so big, really) where, for one reason or another, no one ever has clear-cut or farmed or sliced into what is, by all accounts, a lone stand of trees that has been itself, untrammeled, since before the arrival of the white-skins (a word I'm borrowing from Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. I'm all poco lit these days, with that postcolonial-speak on the brain).

And then the clouds moved in and we ran like rabbits (though I had to pee like a racehorse!)

-- and dashed back to the car in time to watch the drops from inside --

Further west

A few photos from our time in Chicago -- did you know that one of the world's eight Baha'i temples looks out onto Lake Michigan, just south of where the property tax for the year is about a 100K? Gulp. Leafy suburbs can tuck away all sorts of mysteries.

And a detail from this nonagon (can you tell its got nine sides?) --

And then the lake itself --

Somehow this magical lake is channeling the turquoise greens and blues of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean. I don't think Lake Erie is hip enough to pull that off.

There was a rip tide, so no swimming. But Hazel and Paul made hay while the sun shone (we did just read Little House in the Big Woods.) And the whole time I kept wanting to say 'ocean' -- had to catch myself -- like that's the only word available for large-wave-producing-body-of-water-that-makes-your-soul-leap-up.

And then that many-roomed and tortuously-arranged aquarium perched on the edge of the lake downtown. For a moment I had an apocalyptic vision of all the glass smashing and the million-gallon tanks freeing their salt-water prisoners to the wilds of fresh water and the promise of an ocean beyond -- if they could just make it to the St. Lawrence seaway (long fresh gill-killing trip).

And a few details --

And then the famed Art Institute -- took my breath away -- though we did take the 7-and-under tour, which meant no waterlilies, no pausing or perusing, lots of dancing along the ballet barre, a catching here and there of what I could grasp at --

Canvas of texture in the garden to the south --

And that classic midwest spelling idiosyncrasy --

Lion looks on...

Re-start, initiate, stay up late

The second school year passes in a whoosh -- a disparate visit or two to this lonely site of mine, outpost of thought, a semi-abandoned Pluto of notions. (Not always, but sometimes.) Updated last last summer (with the exception of a post from the left coast). We headed west to Ohio.

And it's now later still -- still later. Hazel turns 5 in twelve days and counting.

Yeah, true -- 'ohhh...alright...', as Roy Lichtenstein would have me think -- or say? -- or be? Whatevs. (Thanks, Art Institute of Chicago.) Part of me says, "I guess I can be OK with that." Ohio has been happening in all its midwestern glory. And so has Chicago. We spent a happy early-July weekend in Wilmette (see above), one of the leafy (boozy) suburbs on the north shore -- but you know this, right? (The echo-y chamber of this interweb, especially at almost midnight, is enough to make you wonder who your audience really is.) I guess folks know where the North Shore is. At any rate -- Happy Hazel! Which is most days. This one was on Lake Michigan:

you belong here

So. We're on the BART, heading from SFO to MacArthur. It's Pride Day San Francisco. And then Hazel fell asleep. She missed the super-girl in fancy cape and sequined black cat mask. The tights with hot pants. The smushed-together-ness and the crush increasing until a full-on nigh-impossible critical threshold broke at Powell Street and spilled out onto the be-costumed platform. ("It's worse in Bejing -- every day," says one hip young rider to an older woman beside her—and then, small explanatory nod, "I lived there for a year.") And then this. A guy—slim, Asian-American, dressed all in his riding kit (that's what the cyclists call it) and resting against a carbon-fiber whatnot, a rainbow'd something on a chain around his neck, a little cycling cap poking out from under a real helmet. The underside of this cap reads, "You belong here." He's standing beside a woman (she is not small, nor slim) and she is also in biking gear, leaning against a sweet ride of some sort and wearing a seriously stiff red tutu. Short hair, plaid flannel, discernible muscles. They talk for a moment about where they're (separately) riding—they're standing in the same small office of space, connecting amidst the flux. The one gets off before the first (the woman gets off later, 19th street, I think)—and the guy calls out, "Happy Sunday…" pause, a beat "—Happy Pride." You belong here.

just photos

We head back east after an Ohio summer -- first through early morning commuters, then into sunshine and open country: