Quiet colors

Ah, a good book

Apple time

"It's apple time again," a young farmer said,
as he unloaded a crate of Macintosh apples at
his stand at the Union Square Greenmarket.
"Nothing better."

At just after sunrise that morning, the farmers' trucks
pulled in, from farms around the Hudson, upstate New
York, and Vermont. I love to watch as this square in
the city transforms into a market, as it has for the
last 30 years.

All day people bustled around in search of tomatoes
and squash flowers, spinach, green peppers and late
season corn. They bought bunches of lavender gathered
in twine and apple-pear crumble crisp just baked in an
upstate oven the night before.  

A Half Hour and a Dime

                                       


                                      


I like the notion of small steps

and where they can take us.

I was thinking of something Ray Bradbury said in an interview with Dana Gioia about writing his novel, Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury lived in a lively house with abundant noise thanks to two small children and life - the way it teems all around us.

Bradbury told Gioia he had a story he wanted to get down on paper about why the world needs books and the ideas that live in them. He couldn’t afford to rent an office but one day he happened upon the typing rooms in the basement of the UCLA library.

For 10 cents a half hour, he could type away. He created a society where books were burned, a character named Montag, a fireman who burned those books, and a young girl named Clarisse who liked to taste the rain and question things, a young person who would make Montag think and bring about change.

He had his idea, a series of days and a bag full of dimes.

I like to picture it: each morning, he stepped down into that basement, enveloped in the clacking of keys, popping another dime into the coin slot, nurturing his idea until it became a novel.

Those last days of summer ~

The playgrounds have grown quiet;

the beaches hushed. 

As summer dances off for another year,

a wistfulness washes in.  

Behind that wall

When I was small I would have conjured up a whole world
that existed beyond that stone wall. 
What magic lived beyond those burnished red grates? 
I still like to wonder.

Brio

We were visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art when we happened upon this young woman talking about a painting I'd always liked. It’s called “The Horse Fair” by Rosa Bonheur, a French painter who lived and worked in the mid and late 1800’s.

The energy in the painting was palpable. Everything seemed to move, the muscular legs of the horses, the arms of the one of the men as he pulled taut on the reins, the darkening clouds in the sky. It took up much of the wall as if to say,  “Stand here; take a long look.”

  

The Met’s gallery label said that “for a year and a half (Bonheur) made sketches twice a week in the horse market in Paris, on the boulevard del’Hopital, dressing as a man in order to attract less attention from horse dealers and buyers.” How daring of her to be there on her own terms, to spend that much time preparing to create her painting, to get it that right.  

If that said “brio,” so did the lecturer. I paused for a few moments to hear her. She was utterly swept up in the work. I had visited with this painting many times but hadn’t seen all the nuances she saw. Her exuberance charmed us; we leaned in to listen some more.