walk which way

Bloggin from the nook.

While everything else is on hold for two weeks for swim lessons, my walk at work has been the highlight of each day. Lest that sound lame, let me tell you what I saw on Monday: three American Goldfinches pecking for bugs on the marshy mud stream bank, one silvery fish leaping into the air to catch a bug, one frog (toad?) sitting in wait with its eyes just above the water, one frog jumping with a splash away from my earthquake footsteps as I crossed the stones over the back part Japanese garden, and a family of Canadian geese with teenage kids settling down for a nap.

I didn't see much yesterday but it was rainy most of the day, which left an unfamiliar heft of damp and warm in the air-- an unusual combination for this part of the world. Walking through an oak grove over slippery cobbles was the softest whiff of childhood summers-- being out in the woods during a cloudburst, the palpable solitude in the stillness after the shower. Here, however, mosquitoes don't rise back up and call in the humidity.

Today my walk was less eventful, although I tried a new route and I did see a couple of men diving in the campus lake. Seemed like they were fixing plumbing in there, which was interesting. It's a wonder anything could be seen in the murky water, except at the shallow edges where tiny fish hang out and taunt the garter snakes.

While researching Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books today I came across Which Way Secret Door books, which spoke to me so as a child that I'd stay up til midnight to knock on the back of my wardrobe three times... hoping a secret door would open to the Monster Family. Anyways, the woman who wrote them,
Rita Gelman, is pretty nifty.

I also came across this art exhibit by Brian Eno which made me physically ache for missing San Francisco. So many unique opportunities and resources there, just waiting for someone to come along-- early morning at the wave organ, wandering around the Palace of Fine Art's tidy-bowl pond, climbing down from Coit Tower to splash in Levi Fountain on an empty Sunday, walking out from between the Dutch windmills to the foggy sand of Ocean Beach. Portland doesn't have Brian Eno putting on a high-tech art exhibit, and we don't have a game of Jewel Thieves and FBI Agents going on downtown; see?

We do have a smaller echo of the clothing as performance art that happens in San Francisco, which is perhaps why Morales' proposed ban on used clothing imported to Bolivia is such a fascinating and strong statement to me. Pros and cons, good stuff.