Skylines
Monday night a week ago, I grabbed this image from our hotel balcony just before we took a taxi to Harvard Square. There, we surged with the crowds as if we knew where we belonged. We walked with purpose as if we were certain where we were going. We ended up quite by chance in a basement restaurant peopled mostly by students and it was plain that we were outsiders.
Tonight--a week later--we helped a friend load into the trunk of his faded red sedan the deer he shot over in the pasture beside the barn. Then we came into the warm house and ate leftovers, watching the fire through the glass door of the woodstove. No one has driven past the house since the hunter left two hours ago.
Traveling away, especially to places so stimulating and alien to our chosen home, it takes me at least a week afterward to sort out exactly where we live, to rehearse again how and why we ended up just here, and to reestablish where we are going with these lives apart in the country. I think tonight, finally, I am able to feel the tempo of Goose Creek and Floyd again. I am reaccustomed to the beautiful dark, to the quiet, to slow living. Bare trees against an indigo sky full of stars is, after all, my favorite skyline.
Comments
Looks like it was a wonderful sunset those buildings (and even the clouds in the east, if my eyes don't deceive me) are reflecting.
As the reminder of how and why... disconcerting though it can sometimes be to go through that re-evaluation, that process can also refresh and renew belief in what you hold dear, can it not?
Posted by: andy | November 16, 2004 9:50 AM
Congratulations, Fred--you managed to take a picture of the Boston skyline WITHOUT the Hancock Building jumping up in the middle. I didn't think it could be done! (Not that there's anything wrong with the HB, now that they fixed that pesky falling-window problem--it's just eerily always THERE, wherever you look.)
I hope the basement restaurant was John Harvard's Brew Pub. There are others, of course, but John Harvard's was always my fave.
Posted by: Doc Rock | November 16, 2004 3:54 PM
You manage to do quality stuff consistently, but something about this entry struck me as especially well-done.
Posted by: Trey | November 16, 2004 4:32 PM
The eye/brain combination is too darn good at filling in the missing words- that first comment should have read "As to the reminder of how and why..."
Posted by: andy | November 16, 2004 6:09 PM