Fragments From Floyd

The morning after the Milky Moonlight experience, before the hay bales would be taken away leaving a beautiful but empty foreground, there remained that magical quality to the pasture. All summer it grew shaggy and unkempt, full of spiderwebs, vertical in the tall grass, high as my shoulders. Now, clean shaven and formal, it gave the appearance of having been made ready for some grand event. Autumn, perhaps. It begged to have one more picture taken, so we could remember it the way it looked at graduation. Or death. Or setting out for a long trip around the world, back again in late April.

Funny how appropriate the frame seems to me this morning--a metaphor for this different kind of day I spend here since the work carries me away every day. When I'm here, I'm not really, not in the total immersion way I had been most of the past months when being here was the whole story of my life. At the center is the textbook, the lab, the other projects already underway when the teaching role popped up. These are what I dream about, or lie awake pondering--not spider webs or moonlight or any kind of light or color in words or pixels.

Not that I don't notice the little details--the bunching of the blackbirds preparing to carpool south; the spots and smudges on the poplar leaves, dying already, waiting to fall; the way the clouds have begun to tatter and fray in the way they do only in early autumn. I see these things in passing as I'm coming and going to work. I find myself holding up an artist's frame of thumbs and index fingers in opposing "L"s, making a box around beauty, quickly composing a mental picture to indulge in, some other time, saying a brief silent word of appreciation. And then I sit down for the pre-dawn morning hour to generate study notes on the taxonomy of bacteria and a few test questions.

Larger image, without the frame, here in the gallery.