Scribblings with Green Chalk


the trees, the trees
March 27, 2008, 9:59 am
Filed under: Florida, the blogosphere

Long time, no posting. I’ve been wondering how much time it takes for a ‘blog death’ to take effect. Hopefully, more than a few weeks away from the computer. I’ve been traveling and and trying to finish up some important school work, which didn’t leave time–nor any real desire–to keep up with blogging. So I was appreciating other things. Moreover, I was cut off from the internet for much of the time. And since there was no urgent work to be done on state (OK, school) level, I had no regrets.

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I don’t know exactly how it happened that I became obsessed with pictures of trees. It was probably something about my first visit to Ithaca, how the trees looked crusted with snow, how light fell. When I came back in the summer, a friend told me about woman who went to the gorge every day to take a picture of the same tree and trace how it slowly changed with the seasons.

Pictures of trees dominate in my Florida album. It’s been a long time since I lived near a forest, let alone in one, so those mornings in Florida, when I woke up to the sound of branches moving in the breeze and twigs snapping under squirrels’ paws, were more than photo opportunities. Those sounds could only be taken in memory (you can’t record the drowsiness or the morning chill that make them what they are). And the pictures themselves are nowhere near what it really is like. That’s the point in taking them.

tr2

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Last Piece of Cherry Pie
February 25, 2008, 7:32 pm
Filed under: Florida, culinary imagination

cherry pie

Doro let me have the last piece of her fabulous cherry pie. You are what you eat. I’m cherry pie.



“the state with the prettiest name”*
February 25, 2008, 4:22 pm
Filed under: Florida, weird geography

Florida.

I got here at the end of one of the longest days in my life. After a string of trains and planes, beads of heterotopias.

It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Which always means your world, that is, mine.

evening

*from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Florida.”