Skip to main content

The Gray Lady


The Gray Lady stands with a foot on each side of the river, ringed with enhanced lakes.  Even in summer, the rains come down--water seeking water--to wash their way to New Orleans.  

We are opposed to climate change, here, in the Twin Cities.  We do not favor murderous thunderstorms and tornadoes.  We do not need days such as we are being promised for this weekend, nearly a hundred degrees, with a dew point up into the eighties.  We do not even favor these in-between, gray days, when everything loses its precision and clarity, and muddles off into fuzziness and blahs.  

But we cope.  At least we do not have a dry heat.  When it warms up here, small rivers run down our backbones--water seeking water--on their way to New Orleans.

Comments

  1. Også her har det vært "mye" vær i perioder. I midten av juni flømmet halve Gudbrandsdalen over og hus og biler og campingvogner og mye annet forsvant i Lågen. Juni var den mest nedbørsrike måneden siden målinger startet for over 100 år siden! Nå er det mer normalt; sol og regn om hverandre.
    Vi drar til Hvaler i morgen, - der er det alltid fint vær!
    God sommer!

    Hilsen Per B

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, I forgot to tell: Magnus has decided to be a sailor. He is through his first year at the University College of Vestfold studying Nautic. In two years he'll have his bachelor, and after x months of practice he'll have his sertificate. This summer he is working as a deck boy (?) at the ferry at Hvaler.
    I can see from yor nice pictures that Mari is a decks girl!
    Hilsen Per B

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mari is an "aft deck" hand, only. I need Magnus to man the foredeck.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...