Good Dog, Gracie

Today, I read a cartoon by an artist called Bird Born about adopting a dog from an animal shelter. The story reminds me of Gracie who, like the adopted dog is a bit ill-mannered but also very joyful and lively.

She is becoming less ill-mannered in our daily walk but no less joyful. Today, when I had to sit to remove a sharp nut shell from my shoe, she consented to sit and take in the view, then to lie down and wait. She has learned this new skill as well as this command "s-l-o-w s-l-o-w s-l-o-w" when we walk on wet wooden bridges, slick and slippery with grunge.

Accidental Complements

Breathless

I wish I really knew how to use my macro lens. I lie down, inch forward, squirm back, squinch, lean, hunch, stand, sit, set and reset every option, study the light and shadow and foliage, tinker, and still . . . nothing I take pleases me.

Breathe, I remind myself; relax, I repeat; remember -- it took more than a year to figure out a different camera and lens.

But the year unfolds now, always now, and still now, never waiting for me to catch up.

Picturing It Slant

So I cheated. 

The bridge to Hardee-McGee Field doesn't look exactly like this from underneath.

So what?

Thanks, Emily (Dickinson), for backing me up on this one:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

If I Were a Reading Teacher

I would earn an F. I've been trying, but she hasn't. Not quite anyway.

Still I am finding things I'd like to photograph with a good camera. 

I am growing impatient with the limitations of a cell phone and the wet weather.

But not with Gracie. She's still young.

Walking with J's Gracie

while my friend heals heals me.

Gracie is all senses -- she marks and sniffs and watches, swims and shakes and admires.

Gracie likes me and trusts me -- she waits at the door for my arrival and jumps on me eagerly, she looks at me while she walks, she holds no anger, and she doesn't sense mine.

Gracie is kind -- she pauses when I have to go downhill on the wet stepping stones more slowly than she and when I have to stop to retie a shoe lace. She even lets me take an occasional cell phone snap.

Gracie likes the lake and Abbo's Alley as much as I do -- the goats and chickens, the ducks and water, the paths and views, shadows and light, the greenhouses and their magic, the creek and bridges, the crocus and fallen trees with their fungus.

We walk each morning at 9, and for an hour or more I think only of Gracie and the pleasure of walking with her.

I am grateful for her company.

Lightened Load

early blooming in Abbo's Alley

A Favorite Pair of Words

Leaf Litter
by Heather McHugh

Things are not

unmoving (or else what

is ing there for?)

The things once-living

fall on the never-living

all the more movingly for the eye

that passes over them.

The wind wells up

to spill a trail

of onces off the nevers,

take opaque from eye

to mind, or near it —

every rocking takes some leaving

to a stonish spirit.

Intentional Reflections

The Blue Chair color as deeply satisfying as Abbo's Alley fall leaves.

Always Check the Rearview

I noticed the glass bricks from far below, in Abbo's Alley, and I decided to investigate. I should have done it years ago.

Not being a paying member of the Fowler Center with athletic privileges, I usually just walk or drive by the place without notice or thought (except for the pedestrians). Ignorance in this case is definitely not bliss.

Glass bricks.

Shadows.

Even a late-blooming weed.

What's not to love?

Jump!

Press button, hold, release to contact campus police.

Unless you're this guy, who lives on and inside the emergency call box.

Fall Color ABCedarian: K

KOMBU GREEN

Fall Color ABCedarian: H

HEMATITE AND HELLEBORE

Fall Color ABCedarian: F

FOREST GREEN, FALLOW, FIELD DRAB

Fall Color ABCedarian: C

CELADON AND CANARY

Two-for-One

I've seen it before.

I've never been lucky enough to snap it.

Today I was.

Visioning

I
What do you see in this picture?

 

And in this one?

A shadow and little stream in the first; a beautiful damselfly in the second.

I suspect you did not see this Great Spreadwing in the upper left of the first photo, but I did when I stood there this afternoon. I saw it because of my previous experiences and practiced vision.

II
I recently watched an episode of Morse with a scene in a stately home's picture gallery. On entering, the detective Morse said, "The pictures. Aren't they beautiful?" The gentleman in the room looked around at the paintings, turned, and replied, "Are they? I live here, so I know they're valuable. But I don't know their beauty. I can't see it." "Pity," Morse responded.

III
Keith Woods' refined and moving personal essay reminded me again of the different ways we see and feel depending on unique perspectives. The writer comes to new understanding about his father's complex relationship (and his own) to his "flawed homeland," not always visible to others. 

IV
Even the essay's meaning and beauty were not visible to other commenters to the Facebook post of the essay.

I agree with Morse. Pity.

V 
Aired on and published by NPR, the essay is well worth reading and hearing.

Seasonal Warnings

The Great Spreadwing and water know: fall is coming.

Reserves

Sometimes, they're depleted. The body, for instance, can withstand suffering, or pain, or disease so long before it gives up, and the person in that body gives in. I saw someone today, an acquaintance, someone I like and have not seen for sometime but have thought about, and her reserves are depleted, depleting. I left her feeling drained, more than sad, but sad yes, but more than and less than . . . empty perhaps.

So I did what I often do: I took my camera outside to experience a now, find something beautiful, look at it, try to capture some part of it, and in the process not think, not remember, not wonder, not feel. And I found this.

While I was looking and trying to use my camera so it might match my eyes, I heard a banjo, frailing style, a run of notes picked again and again and again. Someone practicing, someone else getting outside of the self perhaps, entering something beautiful in the making. I wandered to the music, where I found Adam, a new professor here, teaching himself banjo. Political theory is his scholarly interest, so we chatted about Brexit and the implications of national uprisings, but we also talked about teaching, students, folk music, writing, community, the perimeter trail. Before turning home from a chat we both enjoyed, I asked to take his picture and we looked at the snaps together, shook hands, and parted. He played me off, and I left lighter than when I arrived.

Our meeting didn't change anything for the young woman I cried with earlier, it didn't change others' nationalist spirits, it didn't change my ineptness with the camera, but he changed my afternoon, gave me joy, made my step out of the tree canopy lighter as I turned toward home.

And for that, I am grateful.

Another Instructive Photo Failure

Abbo's Alley, late afternoon in summer. Hunched on the ground, a woman of a certain age, pointing a camera down toward the bank's edge. Darkness to the left and behind, bright light low on the right, bouncing off water. Rap music pounding a beat from a basement apartment at Alley's Edge, reverberating. 

Enter three walkers of a certain age, one woman, two men, each with a small dog -- one Yorkie, two Westies. They're talking. Only a few words are audible outside their group.

Yorkie Walker:  Some of the best writing I've seen. Two Chinese students. Never wrote in English till they came to the University. Just beautiful composition, so . . . .

A bit further into the Alley.

Female Westie Walker: George . . . ?

Yorkie Walker: Elliot?

Male Westie Walker:  Henry George Lewes!

Female Westie Walker: Yes, that's right!

Heading back later.

Yorkie Walker: You know what novel I'd like to read? One about her relationship with her father. Now that . . .

Woman photographer stands.

Photographer: D****t!

Photographer walks back to the path, is soon followed by the dog walkers.

This Alley reverberates still.