Night Ride Home

It's dark before I leave campus to drive home over our little mountains. On my morning commute, I'm usually rushing and don't have time to pull over, aim the camera at the sugar maples flaring into near-levitating masses of butterscotch yellow. The red maples are nearly finished--just a few clutches of leaves burning now--and the thornless honey locusts, such a screaming yellow a few days ago in the rain, are nearly denuded. Fog in the mountains nearly every morning--some days I literally drive through a cloud or two--and a bit of snow yesterday, not enough to stick but just a foretaste of what's to come. On the drive home, I pointed the camera unsteadily at some oncoming headlights and came up with this shot.

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From Gary Soto's poem, "At the All-Night Cafe":

America is at work. There is the splotch of blue neon
Behind the left leg, renegade line in the right eye.

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My copy of Jill Rosser's new book, Foiled Again, arrived yesterday at the office. It's the winner of this year's New Criterion Prize. Looking forward to reading it over the holiday.

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This afternoon we sorted through clothes and cleaned out two bags full (including several jackets) to donate to a campus clothing drive. I can actually find my winter shirts now (and my gloves and scarf)!

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R just came back from the grocery with a surprise for me: a zygocactus, loaded with salmon buds. Very nice! We are doing some attic cleaning tomorrow, and today bought a couple of plant lights for the shelves I use to start seedlings in late winter. This afternoon, in the garden, I saw that one of our hostas had ripe seed pods, so I picked them to bring inside. As the pods dry, they'll split along three seams and open, revealing the black seeds all tucked in neat rows. The hosta's seed apparatus looks a bit like a maple seed (i.e., somewhat winged), but it's much smaller and very thin. I've had good success with planting them, and the seedlings grow to blooming size within two or three years.

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