15-miles Outside

MoPac East Bike Trail - My First Summer Ride

 

For The Picking

First Ripe Strawberry, 2012

With the mild weather the garden seems to have burst open with ripe fruit and vegetables. This was the first ripe strawberry the urban wildlife left behind for small human consumption. N was thrilled. Thrilled, I tell you. Thrilled.

When I lived in Colorado the soil was too sandy, my life too chaotic to grow things. I remember turning to M and supposing out loud that most good people have gardens. If you look at the people I know, fifteen years later, I'd say it's confirmed. Most good people have gardens, or wish they did.

We dropped the last of the seeds in the ground this weekend. Dill, cilantro, basil, carrots, cucumbers. The tomatoes get starts rather than seeds. We like tomatoes. We like tomatoes a lot.

Rolling Drop Off

Prescott Family Bike To School Day, 2012

Adaptation

I wake sometimes before my alarm and lay in bed. This time of year the mornings are cold and the day warms gently. We sleep with the windows open. I lay there with cold bedsheets on all sides and the pungent smell of wet grass hanging in the air. I stare at the ceiling and listen to the harsh, clattering noise from the birds outside. The squawks and calls drown out any street traffic. 

The noise is deliberate. A complicated language. One I don't speak. I like to lay in bed just to listen. Each conversation with its distinct tones. I'll venture a guess occasionally that they're cooing over babies, arguing over position, or just moaning with loneliness out there. 

My niece spoke bullfrog once. She was an infant, swaddled in her parent's arms, on the dock outside their cabin. The tall grass along the lake shore full of croaking bullfrogs. She heard the bullfrog conversation taking place and didn't hesitate before joining in. Her parents tuned their ears to the shoreline and followed suit. 

I woke up this morning before the alarm and I fell in love with this peculiar, and expansive world. The complicated way we reach out to each other, the ways express ourselves. Even the empty spaces, the quiet morning, filled with chatter of one sort or another. A noisy, sometimes harsh, conversation about our living.

Morning Pose

"The heart does not age, it is the flesh that wrinkles."    
- Carla Zarebska

Wait! Wait!

 Tonight's Lied Center Stage in Lincoln, Nebraska

I spent the evening, perched in a front row seat, among a crush of Nebraska Public Radio listeners in attendance for the Live Recording of Wait Wait...don't tell me! 


The evening started with a dark stage and a luminescent disco ball, and it only got better. My personal high point of the evening was Carl Kassell's off-air impersonation of Darth Vader. 

So listen for the Lincoln show this weekend. And if you hear a familiar guffaw from the front row it's because I was in the zone with Roy Blundt Jr. He referenced this soon-to-be released video game that I had been poking around for details about all week. 

City Limits

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind. 

-Annie Dillard