september garden (photography)

 Right now I am working on a short nonfiction essay. I have just finished reading Animal Dreams and it was so, so excellent. There is homemade rosemary pizza dough rising in the kitchen and tomato sauce made from our own tomatoes cooling on the stove. I have an interview for another barista job on Friday. I go home for a whole, glorious month just one week from today.

“I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.” Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

My beautiful bicycle!

pentecost ballooons

thanksgiving weekend

 

It is so nice to have a break! The air is crisp and cool, there were spinach-mozzerela-pesto crepes earlier today, a tour through a lovely new local American art museum, and (bien sur) a little bit of Arrested Development.

And, finally, a few lovely pictures of my brother and I, together, both presentably dressed and looking reasonably content and related!

autumnal leaves

A few photographs I took last Autumn, more to follow from this Autumn - the leaves are amazing!

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

    Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 

        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

        And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

        Until they think warm days will never cease, 

            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Keats, "To Autumn" for you. A little remnant of my summer Romanticism class. The weeks are flying by, the weekends disappear in a blink, and I cannot quite believe that this will be my last Fall at Wheaton.

little philosophies

"The real struggle…is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for her life to begin."

—Caroline Knapp 

Photo: George Ko, "Ablution"

kent: life in the downs

photography highlights: ruth orkin

"American Girl in Italy"

"Friends" New York City, 1943

(This is the best one)

Another favorite 40s photographer (they really were the best at capturing moments in the lives of ordinary but intriguing people). Ruth Orkin - her series on an American Girl in Italy is fantastic, some of the photos are funny, some wistful, some stressful, all wonderful. I thought of the photographs because I, too, will be the girl sitting on a fountain in a strange country with a lap full of books all summer . . .

Did I already post on her at some point? Ah, well, she's worth it.