Boo!

Blogger wasn't able to upload my photo tonight, but that's all right.

I live in Austin, Texas. There's that old saw that everything's big in Texas, and I don't know about that, but there are a lot of people with big hearts open wide. Times get awkward, but they steadfastly show up, not flashy or pretentious or interfering. Love's in the music and it's in the water. It sings from a deep well.

Heyyyyyyyy!
Heyyyyyyyyyyy!

I found this framed photo displayed in a local pizzaria, and asked permission to take a snapshot. I'm pretty sure, but not positive, that it was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

A little girl runs round and round a cafe table.

A faded guitar pick is hiding by the sidewalk.

A neighbor waves from his carport workshop;

music from the 1940s drifts from his radio as I walk on.

Dancers are swaying to the big band trombone

somewhere long ago.

'I hear a symphony -'
Holland-Dozier-Holland

I arrived in Dripping Springs early for yoga, and, responding to the enthusiastic waving of kid volunteers, I stopped to look at the roadside pumpkins that are a traditional yearly fundraiser for a local church.

After yoga, I drove back home to Austin on a highway that runs along a railroad. I glanced at the train there in the dark and noticed a freight car that read 'Canadian Pacific', then I turned my eyes back to the road.

When I got home, I dug The Old Farmer's Almanac 2012 out of my bag, because a quote on the title page had caught my attention. I thought I might share it in the blog, or maybe not. Then I saw whose quote it was, and well, it seemed the decision had already been made.

'Nothing is too small to know, and nothing is too big to attempt.'

- Sir William C. Van Horne
U.S.-born railroad entrepreneur and
Canadian Pacific Railway executive
(1843-1915)

I don't know how to paint but I keep painting.
I don't know what I'm painting but I keep painting.

Austin, Texas, September, 2011







It's easy for me to stay holed up in my living room, visiting Youtube links to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World, or tapping out Facebook congrats to distant friends on their birthdays, or digging in Wiki to learn what a Ruben's Tube is. I can hunt for weather data and news articles if I like. But sometimes I feel I learn more about the world when I venture out my door. I brave the neighborhood streets, the noise, the construction in progress and look for Venus in the night sky, smell for rain and how heavy is the car exhaust tonight? In the morning, I might walk for coffee and look at the people I pass. Are they worried? cheerful? Are there kids outside? Are they having fun? Are there monarch butterflies migrating overhead? Sometimes the cleanest data on the state of the universe is right outside the door.

July, 2010, Oakland, California

July, 2010, Oakland, California

East Bay, California, September 2010

Oakland, California, September 2010

Berkeley, January, 2010


softly
the pigeons fly
the painter plies his brush

California, April, 2010

Late one afternoon when I was a girl in Louisiana, I went walking in a field with my sister, my dad, and a family friend. The fields were brown, and the unpaved road was dust, and though it was fall, the weather was hot and dry. There was a drought going on. The grown-ups talked about the crop failures, and the threat of fires. They talked about how long the drought was lasting...several years! There was grave concern. Things did not look, smell, or feel normal during the walk through the field. The sun set, fiery red, in a flat empty sky.

And then one day, it began to rain again.