Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
31
Oct 19

This week we show color

For Halloween, this fall dressed as winter. It snowed today. Pretty much all afternoon and into the night. The Yankee, who says this is the earliest she’s ever been snowed on, is ready to plan spring break. Embrace the pain of the cold and the wind. There’s five months to go. Five months of this.

Where I’m from, those monster masks were too hot to wear on Halloween. Tonight was one of those never-warm-enough nights. Five more months of this.

Anyway, more foliage! We must enjoy them while we can. That’s what this week is about around here. After the wind and this cold snap, they’ll likely all be scurrying across the ground by the weekend.

All of these are on campus which is, to be sure, quite beautiful during the leaf turn.

Twigs are less beautiful. Oh, sure, they are important. Those leaves don’t just hang there. They don’t pull the nutrients out of the very air. They just don’t put on the same show as the leaves, no matter their color of the moment.

And we’ll have a long time to enjoy those poking up into the air. It isn’t the winter or the cold or even the snow or really the grey skies, you understand. OK, it is a little the grey skies. The immutable grey skies are a part of it. But the cold and the wind and the snow all have their place. I guess. And I can stay inside to avoid most of that, like a reasonable human being.

It’s that we won’t see any signs of spring until the first week of April. The sheer necessary endurance aspect of it all. Knowing that, sometimes just after Valentine’s Day I should see green things emerging, but instead, it’s another two months of twigs. That’s the unembraceable challenge.

Now if I had a spring break every month or so, some place warm, or, heck, even mild. That’d be OK. Alas.

Anyway, happy Halloween, and happy winter.

Catober — Comments Off
31
Oct 19

Catober, Day 31

history / IU / photo / running / Wednesday — Comments Off
30
Oct 19

This week we show color

Since this week we’re using color as the gimmick here, I suppose this post is in the “These colors don’t run … but I do” category.

So I’m walking in the building today and I just casually pass by the Ernie Pyle display case. And I thought, this shouldn’t be a thing you don’t even think about. It isn’t a shrine, but Ernie is sort of the patron saint of the journalism program here. He grew up not far away, attended school here, dropped out his senior year to go write at a commercial paper and then built, one column at a time, one of the most successful careers of the mid-20th century. He was killed in the Pacific near the end of World War II and he’s venerated here, almost 80 years later.

Just sitting there, is the man’s typewriter.

I believe that’s one of his domestic machines. He perhaps wrote tons of self deprecating letters and some of his better stateside professional work on this. It’s next to his medals and diplomas and books and his action figure — this is a journalist with an action figure — and some other personal effects.

Here’s the left shoulder of his European field jacket. You can still see the sweat and dirts ground into the collar. But the patch is interesting of its own accord.

Someone had to stitch that as a part of the war effort. How many of those did they make? And who sewed that on the jacket? How many of those did they make? And what did the men who saw them on other men’s soldiers think?

We know what they thought of Ernie Pyle. They absolutely loved him. They loved him because he wrote about the men, not the generals, and he endured the unendurable with them. The work he did meant it was an inevitable byproduct.

These colors I saw while running today:

It was the neighborhood 5K. It was cool, but not so bad that you minded once the heart rate got up, but you noticed it when you got the full sweat. In the last mile I saw this balding tree. The winds are coming in tomorrow. None of these trees will look the same by the weekend.

But look what the sky did in that photo. More accurately, look at what my phone’s processor did to the background of the photograph when I stopped for three seconds to frame up the shot in the third mile of my run. It’s a grey sky, but we’ve got a white one here. Which, hey, snow is also in the forecast tomorrow …

Snow. October. People are going to hear about this.

Catober — Comments Off
30
Oct 19

Catober, Day 30

IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
29
Oct 19

This week we show color

The week of grey, begets the month and seasons of grey. I’m not putting a picture here every day, but I’m thinking about doing so on Instagram, at least until the novelties of X days in a row wear out.

Or is that “wear me down”? That’ll happen. Second half of February. You can count on it. Anyway, there is still a lot of color to behold this week, the brilliance flaring until the chemicals dilute themselves in the cycles of the season just before our ability to misanthropomorphize it all.

That sky was today, the tree above was this weekend.

These two on-campus maples were today. They do like to show off:

See what I mean? I’ve given that maple tree meaning and purpose. I’ve given it ambition and ego. I did that in a sentence. Imagine what I can do when the clock falls back and I’ve got more reason to write, because it is dark out earlier.

I bet this leaf doesn’t see the weekend:

Now that I write that out, I wish I’d thought to mark the thing with a bread tie or something. Just to see. Maples, we say here every year, are nature’s first quitters. But there’s bound to be a tenacious leaf out there somewhere. A stubborn little thing, one where the petiole is just a wee bit stronger than all its brothers and sisters.

I did it again. I want that leaf to be strong, a signal of resistance for me and others who dread the coming of winter. But really I’m depriving the ground of important nutrients, or a landscaper a few more seconds making money with the leaf blower, or perhaps a mulch pile somewhere doing … mulch things.

Have you ever noticed the things we don’t anthropomorphize? Something to consider, isn’t it?