3 posts tagged “my daily perambulation”

So this is Minneapolis, the city where I live.  We've had about two feet of snow dumped on us in the last week; most of it came down on Friday, a few days before this picture was taken.  This is the view I see as I walk back from my second-to-last class of the day on Monday and Wednesday evenings.  Funny, actually—the season is changing, and even within the space of a week, it doesn't get this dark anymore.  So it goes.

I love walking back across the bridge, looking at the city as the lights come on, so I usually walk on the north side of the bridge as I'm on my way home in the evenings; the view on the other side isn't nearly so beautiful.  (During the day, I walk on the south side; it's sunnier.)

This picture wasn't actually taken in 1983, of course.  The colors remind me of the old photo albums we have at home, though, pictures from when I was very small and from before I was born.  I think the world was maybe tinted slightly brown in the eighties—or perhaps just the places my parents took pictures of (the places of which my parents took pictures). 

This is the view from the other side of the Washington Avenue Bridge; it's what I see when I walk to class in the mornings.  You can see a bit of the Shoe Tree there in the corner.  It's funny how much that adds to the composition of the photograph.  It's beautiful to me—but to anyone else, I think, without without the dangling shoes, it's just a cloudy river. This is almost the same shot, but you're smart.  You could have figured that out on your own.  I nixed the colors in this one—look at the beautiful recession of greys.  From the black trees in the front, to the wedge of hilly riverbank (dark grey reflection, the hill itself a shade lighter), to the faded background (there's a highway back there), to the nearly-white sky, and what is either a cloud or a smudge on my computer screen.  Look at this!  I live here; I get to see this every day. I went out of a walk one night as it was snowing.  I asked a few people, but no one wanted to come along—sometimes I wonder why I bother, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to try.  ("No, it's the rejection that stings, haha!")  I enjoy these giant planters—great round cement things, full of dirt.  In the spring and fall (and, I suppose, the summer), they house flowers, but during the winter months they sit empty.  (And by empty, I mean, "with dirt, but without flowers.")  When the snow comes, they're like little round white canvases.  It seems people cannot resist drawing, writing, and sculpting in them.  One of them, last week, had written in the snow the words "insert flowers here."  It made me smile.
This is one of the things that makes snow magical, and the reason I wish someone had come walking with me.

I went out walking by myself that night, without my camera.  This was the shot that made me go back to my room and retrieve camera and batteries.  The shadows on the snowbank...

Look at the snow by the art building!  It's like the Northern Lights, twisting and dancing in the night.  Windy, cold, snowy, beautiful.  I love living in Minnesota.  There's actually a lot I like about this photo—the recession of the brick wall, how crisp the bricks are in the foreground.  The way the light catches the snow and makes it glow in the night; the trees in the back, nearly obscured by the snow-heavy air.  The little patch of brick walkway uncovered by the wind helps ground things too, I think.  Funny how lucky we are, sometimes, to stumble across these beautiful things, and to be able to freeze these moments forever.

It was almost fifty degrees today, and I went out for what is becoming my daily two o' clock perambulation.  (If you missed that, and I don't blame you, all I meant is that it's becoming a habit for me to go walking every afternoon.)

I headed south a little bit from my dorm, and ended up crossing I-94 (and I love that I live right by I-94, because it's the same interstate that we take all the way back to Racine when I drive home with people.  It's like the yellow brick road or something—across an entire land, and leading exactly, exactly, to where I need to go.)  But yes, I crossed over the I-road, and wandered over toward the Sewerd Cafe.  I took some pictures (they're lovely, and I'll put them up some time, perhaps later tonight), and as I was looking around, I saw a house.  It was lovely—you can see it right there to the side.  Look at it!  A small, cream brick house (and I've taken my rant about cream brick houses out of this post, but if you care to read it, here's my history with them.)

In any case, out for a walk today I chanced upon a beautiful old cream brick house, and oh, how I longed to live there.  It was beautiful—the cream-colored bricks, the lovely—lovely!— painted trim, the afternoon sunlight hitting the porch.  Oh my goodness.  I was in love.  I took a couple pictures, and couldn't help but notice—the house next to it was much the same, but sported green trim, rather than reddish orange. 

And I walked closer, and peered down the street, and my heart nearly stopped dead in my chest.  House after beautiful small house, all in a row, all old and brick and with painted porches and trim—on a little street with no motorised traffic allowed, and with a a black cat down the block sitting in the sunlight, and a woman sitting with a book on a painted porch step, and two kids climbing and playing in one of the many trees along the boulevard.

The woman on the porch raised her head and nodded at me as I walked past.  The kids in the tree giggled and said hello to me, and told me how they climbed and played in the trees—"We collected food, see?  The leaves are the food.  And now we're going to take a nap."  "How do you nap in a tree?" I asked.  "Like this!" they said, and they showed me, draping themselves over the branches.  "We're kind of like monkeys," the girl confessed, hanging upsidedown.  "I'm a monkey.  Or a sloth." 

A man jogging by stopped to banter with the kids.  He introduced himself to me and said hello.  "I'm Anders," he said.   "How are you?"

"I'm wonderful," I told him.  I couldn't remember when I'd been better.

I couldn't believe it.  Was this even possible?  Did places like this really still exist?  Everyone I passed said hello.  The kids demonstrated how they climbed up and jumped out of the tree.  Even the black cat walked up to me and tilted its head and arched its back as I petted it. 

The woman from the porch seemed to belong to the boy in the tree.  She walked over and we talked a little.  She asked where I was from—Southeast Wisconsin, I told her.  I'm a student at the U.  "You get to go home soon," she said.  Yes, I agreed.

  "It's prettier in the summer," she said, looking down the street at the tiny,hidden neighborhood.  "But it's nice today, too."

"It's beautiful now," I said, looking around.  In awe.  I don't think there is a thing on earth more beautiful to me than a peaceful corner of the world on an autumn afternoon.  There was a moment of almost-quiet, with only chirping birds and scratching leaves, and the wind, and nearby sounds of the city.  I stood there, silently falling in love with this tiny anomaly of a neighborhood. 

"Only another block and a half, to the end of Milwaukee Avenue," the woman from the porch said quietly....  "Then it all goes away."