Oh, we will. Meanwhile, be teased by this pert little specimen, edging his way out of the waters for purposes unknown.
*I hope you will feel free to sing this title to the tune of Jawbreaker’s ‘Ashtray Monument’. Also to ponder how very apt the (para-)phrase “Octopus… monument… a life spent waiting on cement…” is to this bronzed octo-gentleman, suspended in mid-slither on his concrete slab, as it plays hopelessly round and round in your head.
Nasturtiums, growing wild on a hillside near Fort Mason. I grow them every summer on my little balcony, double blessings, double explosions of firecracker color and hot peppery savor.
I saw them growing leggy and wild in East Africa, and told my guide Tumaini that they were popular to eat here at home. He found this quite eccentric.
I spent a breathtakingly lovely weekend in San Francisco for work last month. As sun-struck and charming as Chicago is these days, I still remember that trip as a luminous bubble of time, a sweet and so perfect lucky-charm of time that I will hold tight to. Windy and clean, air without color, walking over hills to meet each morning. So indulge me while I reminisce, with some favorite pictures from that trip.
This is the first photo I took there. Even though I remember the simple streetside shrub planting where I found it, the image still feels wild and without bounds to me, just a blink of a huge world of wind and light.
This morning before sunrise, in a small field by the railroad tracks, two rabbits scampered, and three grackles morse-coded through the grass, round bodies, brushstroke tails, dot-and-dashing urgently.
Yesterday I found a perfect, fragile little white-throated sparrow. These round buffy birds have a dandelion tousle of yellow feathers running over each eye to their beak, defining the anatomical feature called the lore.
They look like this.
And rather remarkably like this.
Solange has much to teach us about the fabulous beasts of the world, real and imagined.
This morning a squirrel lay on my doorstep. The tight, secret curve of its ear was the first thing I knew about today. No wounds I could see, just a whole and perfect body that wasn’t living anymore.
Walking the few blocks from my train to my office, a woodcock in the street. Damaged on its way down, thin, wrong-shaped by the time I found it.
I don’t want this to be what today is. The breeze-fine fur of a tail, the lean and stiffening legs, the gnarls and angles in their bodies. So I went looking for them alive, so we can celebrate them alive. Courtesy of the internet: squirrels resourceful and shiver-quick in their movement, moving, alive. Woodcocks dancing, round-chested, prowling, instinct and alive. Thousands, millions, forests full of them living, though I can’t see them.
(Silly music, for all their grave and silly charm.)
