Seasonal Impressions

I have a blog coming up for all of you very soon, but I was searching through old gmail attachments, and I found some things worth sharing.

My mood, generally, is very dependent on weather. Sometimes, all I need to restore me is a cool breeze across closed lids. These are two instances, on that took place in a Chicago fall, and one that took place in a Chicago spring, as I was on the eve of heading back to my home state, Michigan.

~*~

FALL.

The Belmont el stop.

The best place to see the sky in Chicago is at the Belmont el stop. A couple of days ago, the transient weather of fall meant that from the open air station, I could see several days of weather in one sky.

To the west, the sky was clear, an enameled cerulean blue.To the northeast, wedding white mares tails, little ice crystal clouds moved in sync to the southwest like lacy old ladies arm in arm, clipping down the street in their sturdy black shoes. To the southeast, however, trouble broiled. Cobalt cloud mountains faded into black marshy mists, and the illuminated buildings against that dark sky looked cut out of the scene. The trains coming from the south were coming wet, and those monsters were rolling towards me, grumbling and snorting in their anger.

The wall of rain over took a few of the orange afternoon-lit buildings and they were suddenly studded with diamond raindrops. With the sun at my back, I saw the rain advancing toward me. A rainbow jumped out in front of me and tried to hold back the torrent, but the storm threw a bolt of lightning and shattered it as it’s partners reached the sun disk in the southwest and shrouded it.

I stepped into the capsule of the train as the rain came beating down. Hissing and roaring, the storm lamented my escape. The train started up and we sped off towards the west. With a few raindrops on my shoulders and the leafy smelling wind still in my hair, I turned to gaze wide-eyed out of the train.

Ahead of me, the sky was still a vibrant tangerine color.



SPRING.
I was thinking today, as I passed over the Chicago River on the el, about things I can sink my teeth into. Like rivers. Like Lake Michigan. Like ladder-like pine trees. Like dunes. Like a steep grade and a narrow path, good shoes, and leg muscles. Like fresh air and flowering trees, like raindrops and layers of history exposed on the sides of sandstone cliffs. Like that yellow-gold-green that leaves turn when you are seeing the sun through them. Like dragonflies and those odd bugs that walk on the surface tension of river water. Like crayfish. Like waves. Like the copper-tasting water in the upper peninsula. Like arctic breezes, lost and wayward down here in the Midwest.

In short, I was thinking today about Michigan. I'm going back to Michigan in one week. I can hardly breathe without wishing I were breathing Michigan air. I can hardly cross the street without wishing I were crossing a Michigan street. Through the library windows, I could see Lake Michigan stretching out away from the city, miles of water and fish and seaweed, shipwrecks and sand. On the other side, waters are a clear cerulean. Here, they are an odd perversion of teal that looks sickly.

Around my neighborhood here in Chicago, I feel differently. I will miss little Albany Park when I'm gone, I think. Getting off of the Brown Line at Francisco, I sometimes find myself thinking of Chicago the same way I think of Grand Rapids. It's not quite words, more like a strong inclination. I get the urge to climb trees, explore houses, walk down alleys, roll in the grass, and slip behind bushes into their secret kingdoms.

Today, the sun came out just before sunset to give the world a hallowed kind of look. The flowering trees in front of the apartments across of Sacramento street gave off a wavering scent in the cool breeze. The rain a couple of days ago washed away the thickness of the air, and now it was clear and sharp. Now, you could inhale the fragrance of those tiny white flowers all the way down to the bottom of your lungs without stuffing up your nose, without causing your eyes to redden and tear. The grass was brightly green against the reinvigorated blackness of the soil. In the house on the corner of Sacramento and Leland, someone served dinner in the airy dining room. The streets were clear and dry. I wanted to get out my bike and tool around, or cover the sidewalks in chalked hopscotch boards. I wanted to get into those bushes and create worlds out of their encompassing branches. I wanted, desperately, to be little again, to have the freedom of late afternoons again. I didn't want to think back or ahead, I just wanted to exist in the ocher-golden light of the evening, and play.

~*~

 I don't write like this much anymore, and I wonder where I lost it. But I still feel the sense of wonder at the changing of the seasons whether I am in Michigan, Chicago, or here in silly old Maryland. The earth is beneath me, the sky above, and nature pervades throughout.

“I feel a pull on the rope, let me off at the rainbow…” - Genesis, “Anyway”
“I can see the orange sky in front of me, I can see things you’ll never see...” Days of the
New, “Whimsical”

Ring-Around-The-Rosie Traffic

This is an accurate representation of how I feel lately. Like a storm of despair with a shot of beauty running through it. If I concentrate hard enough on the rainbow, I don't feel the fear of the storm.

Even the idea of life as a road that I'm following, though cliche, is quite accurate.

Driving and traffic, I've noticed lately, have their own strange beauty to them. I recently got my own car, so I'm driving much more than I ever have before. It occurred to me yesterday, as I rushed on to the expressway on my way to kung fu, that it would be hard to program a computer to simulate traffic. For example, I merged on to 131-South behind a slow semi and in front of a Fed Ex van. Usually, I'm terrified around semis, but my big old (1993) Ford Explorer can't accelerate fast enough to pass the thing quickly, so I slowed down and left it some room and it pulled away from me. I moved a lane to the left. The Fed Ex Van stayed in the lane to my right, and then jumped into my lane, one more lane left, sped past me, and then crossed over again to exit. At first, I thought, "Did you have to ring-around-the-rosie me before you exited?" But then I noticed, as I got closer in to town, that many cars, vans, and even a pick-up truck with a trailer, all do similar seemingly pointless (and dangerous!) manouverings. I supposed that I did them too. I mean, we've all had that conversation with ourselves: "Okay, better pass this guy...isn't that lane closed up ahead? Well, let me squeak in here. Oh shoot, the exit's on the left!" and zip-sip-slip, we're jogging all over the highway, playing ring-around-the-rosie with all the other drivers on the road. It's like a well choreographed dance, except none of us know it. It's a natural kind of chaos, and I suppose it has its own patterns.

I find it, sometimes, a strange coincidence that everyone I see on the road near me is on the road at exactly the same time I am, going the same direction! What are the odds, if you really think about it, that a particular person will be in a particular place at a particular time? And as one by one, each car peels away from me and heads in its own direction, its driver thinking his own thoughts, I am left alone on my route. All of us, maybe six or seven cars, came from different places, converged for a while on a road, and then scattered off again. I wonder, if you watched from above, if these convergings happen noticably, or repeatedly.

I'm sure some civil engineer somewhere knows exactly how these traffic things play out, and all of my new discoveries are in fact old, but traffic and patterns are a safe place for my mind to wander. And it never hurts to see a little beauty in a mundane thing.