Wednesday, March 24, 2010

spinach days

I admit it – I’ll miss my cold, gray, biweekly walks home. The long way. Our CSA winter spinach deliveries will end soon and so will the need to walk over to the pickup spot and after, because there is no good bus connection, to walk home.

It’s a dreary walk. The camera hangs around my neck, but I am rarely tempted to use it. Oh fine, today, for the emerging colors of spring...


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And sure, when I rest the spinach on a bench outside the pickup spot (we all received a gift: a dozen eggs – so beautifully brown that I’m planning the rest of the week’s menu around them!)...


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But otherwise – no.

The walk is a transition thing: you can really loosen up around the edges if you keep the pace brisk.

Today I need more than the four miles and so I stray toward Hoyt Park – oh, add another mile or two. It would be tough to call it a pretty place now, in March, but to me, it has its gray calm.


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Mainly, I need the extra miles. No, not airline miles, not today, but walking miles. Even if they’re almost colorless.


Approaching home, I notice the flowers again. I’m hanging in there. Spring break comes this week-end.

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On my window sill, there is this bird and he just will not leave.


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words

I trot down the hill to get an espresso before my afternoon class. Perhaps trot is the wrong word. This young woman trots.


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By comparison, I saunter at a slow pace.

On the way back up the hill, I am even slower. Smelling the roses, so to speak. And I hear this conversation behind me. Two young men, discussing a love interest of one of them. She is, you know, just a very nice person. Really nice. The kind that you meet and say – I have dibs on her. And then they move on to a retelling of an incident in class where a professor asked for some ungodly amount of work from the lot of them.

I think to myself that I have never heard a relational matter summarized so quickly and, I suppose, so succinctly.


I'm remembering a conversation with my occasional traveling pal. He'd been telling me about an exchange he had had with a friend, concerning travels with, well, his traveling companion. After a few brief sentences, he paused. That’s it? That’s all you said? – I asked. What else more is there to say? – he countered, genuinely puzzled.


In the evening, I walk up to the Capitol Square, where I play with my camera and windowpane  reflections and all the usual nonsense that seems so fun when you’re doing it but utterly silly in retrospect.

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Isn't that so often the case with reflections...


The day ends well. I feast in ways that I rarely feast these days.


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And as I am with friends whom I see too rarely, I give a summary of my most recent thoughts on travel and traveling buddies, and I do this sparingly and succinctly (I think). I can almost hear someone asking – that’s it? Is that all you can say about it? And I have to admit that the answer would be yes.

Sometimes, you don’t have to say a lot. Sometimes, you need say very little and still it is brilliantly clear what it is that you’ve just said. Sometimes.