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. ...

Rose-Colored Glasses and Job Training

About the time God was creating dirt, I enrolled in a church college, and commuted to school, where the President--a man of no uncertain opinions--often spoke in daily chapel, molding our young minds as the Creator himself had once molded Adam from clay.  There was too much organic matter in the dirt that I was, so I failed creative pottery.   The chapel was new during those years, and we heard often about the rose window at the east end, behind us, up in the balcony where dutiful student monitors noted which assigned seats were empty, and reported us to somebody.  Nobody reported which assigned seats were occupied.  It was the sinners who were important.   The College alumni magazine recently reported that the rose window has been refurbished; hauled off to California, and back again, to reclaim its glory.  The article did not note that I  had gone to California, too, years earlier, without achieving glory.  Nowhere in the article does it s...