Mornings like this are why I love Spring in the Midwest: a glowing sky, filled with orange light yet threatening rain, o'erspreading the new green trees...it makes up for the fact that I had an absolutely ICY shower this morning. The sky is wide through my windows. (I'm sad I shal'n't have this room next year.) It makes me think of/ pine for travel. Below are a few pictures from my recent trip to the hill country of central Florida. I backpacked (solo) the state's longest loop trail and rode (both ways) its longest bike trail (with a stop at a strange, distant hotel between legs) and, in between these two jaunts, scorched myself on Clearwater Beach...I have hardly any skin left on me. Enjoy!
Popular posts from this blog
Spring
For years I have contemplated writing an essay about Spring – or, more precisely, an essay about what Spring means to me. And for years I have resisted. It has seemed too great a task. It has felt beyond me. For I realized to write about Spring is to get to the very essence of what made me become a writer in the first place, what made me want to travel in the first place…the very essence of what makes me me in the first place. Well, I’m still resisting, and it still may be beyond me. But here goes. Where I live, Chicago, you see Spring first. Its harbingers are myriad manifestations of light. The first shine on our apartment wall in late February, refracted off the high rise across the street. Then, a few weeks later, come the golden shafts of dazzling sun when it’s clear, the muted, dreamy pastel washes of blues and grays when it is not, the subtle, lingering haze at dawn and twilight, the way the moon shines cold and warm at once. Often I see this light through
Lovely Jewels in Joy Designed
Night Nurse This is a song I first heard one night at the beginning of the magical summer of 2005. Sophia, Paul, and I were on the way home from an afternoon in Milwaukee, and I was feeling down yet expansive and hopeful (as was my wont at the time), lying in the back seat and watching the clouds turn colors with the sunset. I was so struck by its simple, quiet, lovely beauty that I had Paul play it several times. I just heard it for the first time in seven years yesterday, and it brought back a flood of memories, memories of a time where I was not nearly as steadily happy as I am now, a time when I was up and down and open, often at the same time. I think the great struggle I have had, as I get older, is marrying the open expansiveness of youth with the steadiness of maturity (sic.) The two often seem, but don't have to be, mutually exclusive. When I listen to great songs like this, they certainly aren't. It is the last day of the school year, again, and I am in my
Comments