Dear friends,
There is no denying it, gainsaying it or wishing it away. I have been making apologies for being off my blogging feed, but I have been off all varieties of feed lately: off my writing feed, off my egg research feed, off my photography feed, off my baking feed. Were it not for my happy pass through the farmer’s market on Saturday morning, resulting in the purchase of apples (Winesap and Northern Spy) and black kale and Delicata squash and a chicken for roasting and a guinea hen for stewing and two bottles of dry cider to drink with it all, I would start to wonder if I were actually a pod version of myself, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I am reasonably sure that I’m not a pod, but I’m also sure that I am far, far off my writing feed. I can attribute this to no less than six things occurring in my life right now. One, of course, is the election. I could go on and on, but instead I will merely encourage you to vote, and then give you something soothing to look at. It’s not that I advocate mindless escapism; it’s just that we all have a lot of stressful and painful and enormous things to contemplate, and every once in a while we just need to gaze at some lush greenery for a while until our eyes come gently back into focus again.
The photos below are part of the never-ending series of My Brief Moment of Glory in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a subject I never get tired of milking (sorry, luvvies). On my first day in Eureka, I picked up a pamphlet entitled “Six Historic Walking Tours of Eureka Springs” and spent the next several days following the maps. These particular pictures are the ruins of what was Eureka’s three-story brick schoolhouse. If you read the walking tour pamphlet, or visit the Historical Society, you will notice that for such a small town, Eureka has lost an awful lot of buildings to fire and/or lightning strikes. Thus it was, twice, with the schoolhouse. On the day I took these pictures, the weather was hot and hazy, with flecks of pollen floating about in the air. The sky was just overcast enough to provide that interesting silvery pre-storm lighting, without being overcast enough to actually threaten a storm. I felt like I had fallen into a Cocteau Twins album cover. (This is a good thing.)
Oh, Mary, have a wonderful time this weekend. If you run into any of our various and sundry Eureka pals, do say hi for me. (You may want to stay out of Gazebo Books this weekend, though.
The schoolhouse ruins are on the dirt-and-gravel-road portion of Kansas Street. I got there by walking through the wooded area behind Harmon Spring. As you walk along Kansas, eventually you come to a flight of stairs that lead up to the intersection of Kansas and Singleton. The school is directly to the right of the steps. I wanted to go in and get a closer picture of that gyroscopy-looking thing, as apparently it was something the schoolkids used to play on. But it was surrounded by those big scary bees, the ones the size of soybean pods, and I decided ‘twould be best not to piss them off. Maybe now that the weather is cooler, you’ll have better luck.
I never did answer your earlier question, but ‘tis true: I won’t be back at the Colony next summer. This makes me sad, as I really want to come back, but I’ve decided that I need to devote my 2005 vacation time to travel and research (to say nothing of a vacation with Lloyd). Come 2006, though, I should have plenty of notes and will be loaded for bear.
Excellent journal you have yourself, there, btw.