But you can't do things on the cheap, now can you, when you're in society?
Too much of my afternoon was spent on the phone with bureaucracy, but just before sunset ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_reasonable_man came around and we had a very nice socially distanced walk, this time with more water.
I feel good about remembering correctly that the Arlington Reservoir is a man-made rather than natural pond—another nineteenth-century terraforming project—but I had forgotten that its water comes from Munroe Brook and it's part of the same watershed as the Great Meadows due to feeding Mill Brook in turn.
The more I find out about the places I grew up in, the more I feel for Jonathan in Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City (1987), covering for not knowing an important part of his own city's myth-history by saying in his most lordly manner, "If you live in this place, you leave the Gnomon for tourists."
I knew at least that the cloud-reflections looked like drifts of sand under the water.
We walked a parallel trail to the one I took yesterday, narrower and less official, no brook alongside. We passed one dog-walker. The light was fading too fast for most of the trees to come out as anything but dry-leafed dimness, but this sky-climbing tangle had personality.
We made it to the margins of the Meadows just before we had to turn back for the time. It was nothing more than a silhouette in the westering light, but something went overhead that held its legs together like a heron or an egret. Birches look like ghosts wherever they spring.
One scratchy sentinel sunset tree.
One sunset horizon. I tried afterward for pictures of Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, but I think I am going to need a camera that listens to me about shutter speeds.
Like everyone else who reads and has opinions, I am used to running into literary conventions that run directly counter to mine, but while reading Leonard Gribble's The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939) I had to take a second for reasons that had nothing to do with the usual period sexism, anti-Semitism etc. The detective inspector's sergeant is describing the murder victim, a half-back for the fictional amateur team of the Trojans: "I bet this bird never knew what was happening to him, though he looks the kind that might have asked for trouble. Dark hair, bit effeminate in features, well built. But mouth too thin, eyes a bit too close together—" and of course it's not meant to be an approving description and indeed in his brief pre-mortem cameo the character comes off as a talented jerk, but I still bet that in three dimensions I'd have thought he had an interesting face.
a_reasonable_man came around and we had a very nice socially distanced walk, this time with more water.
I feel good about remembering correctly that the Arlington Reservoir is a man-made rather than natural pond—another nineteenth-century terraforming project—but I had forgotten that its water comes from Munroe Brook and it's part of the same watershed as the Great Meadows due to feeding Mill Brook in turn.
The more I find out about the places I grew up in, the more I feel for Jonathan in Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City (1987), covering for not knowing an important part of his own city's myth-history by saying in his most lordly manner, "If you live in this place, you leave the Gnomon for tourists."
I knew at least that the cloud-reflections looked like drifts of sand under the water.
We walked a parallel trail to the one I took yesterday, narrower and less official, no brook alongside. We passed one dog-walker. The light was fading too fast for most of the trees to come out as anything but dry-leafed dimness, but this sky-climbing tangle had personality.
We made it to the margins of the Meadows just before we had to turn back for the time. It was nothing more than a silhouette in the westering light, but something went overhead that held its legs together like a heron or an egret. Birches look like ghosts wherever they spring.
One scratchy sentinel sunset tree.
One sunset horizon. I tried afterward for pictures of Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, but I think I am going to need a camera that listens to me about shutter speeds.
Like everyone else who reads and has opinions, I am used to running into literary conventions that run directly counter to mine, but while reading Leonard Gribble's The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939) I had to take a second for reasons that had nothing to do with the usual period sexism, anti-Semitism etc. The detective inspector's sergeant is describing the murder victim, a half-back for the fictional amateur team of the Trojans: "I bet this bird never knew what was happening to him, though he looks the kind that might have asked for trouble. Dark hair, bit effeminate in features, well built. But mouth too thin, eyes a bit too close together—" and of course it's not meant to be an approving description and indeed in his brief pre-mortem cameo the character comes off as a talented jerk, but I still bet that in three dimensions I'd have thought he had an interesting face.
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Thank you! I am enjoying being outside!
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Thank you!
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Thank you!
And I like that Great Meadows features in both this and the last entry.
I want to get far enough into it to walk around for real! I haven't in—years, probably, now that 2020 is almost but not enough over.
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I didn't read it until adulthood, so I was fine growing up swimming in the Res!
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What?? Why??? That's such a weird thing to say?? Like, I guess if you’re not going to show a body on-screen you could exposition it, but like.... that's such bizarre commentary ("his mouth was too thin! he was asking for it!") that I feel like it's implying something I'm missing.
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Can I pick 'em!
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*Birches look like ghosts wherever they spring.*
Yes! There's a copse of them near here - totally fenced-off now, so I can't explore them. But I wandered in with a friend back in summer and there was a weird effect of light between the trees. It looked like webs or films of grey, just a bit darker than the bark. Like little panels of rain. Somebody else had left his coat just outside the gap in the fence but we never heard him come in, and the coat was still there a week later.
I think I'd have found that man's face interesting too, sergeants be damned.
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Thank you!
Like little panels of rain.
Oh, that's lovely.
Somebody else had left his coat just outside the gap in the fence but we never heard him come in, and the coat was still there a week later.
And that's eerie.
I think I'd have found that man's face interesting too, sergeants be damned.
All My Friends vs. Golden Age Mysteries, film ongoing.
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How about "Ambivalent About Agatha" as a title?
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You're allergic to ghostly unrest, why am I not going to bother being surprised.
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If a birch tree sways toward me on a still day, yes, I am also allergic to that. (If a tree is well tended the soul can go.)
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Nine
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Happy to share!
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Gorgeous photos, and very gorgeous writing! I'm sorry about time spent with phone bureaucracy, but glad you managed to fit in a walk nonetheless.
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Thank you!
The rest of the week has mostly rained, so I am especially glad to have gotten outside when I could.