Buenos Días

Austin in the morning.

Seeing things

Is it too early to think of spring? Is this weather merely a mirage? Maybe so, but tonight it's real, and everything looks lovely in it. The river is calm, reflecting the evolving face of downtown. It's pretty face, I think.

Door girl

There she sits, at the doorway to a restaurant downtown. It appears to be a slow day, her mind seems to be in another place altogether. Where does a young mind wander at times such as this? Is she thinking of her boyfriend? The homework she's got to do? The car she'd like to be driving? Pork?
After a few minutes a few men walk out of the restaurant, she thanks them and wishes them a good day. Does she mean it? How many times must she say those words, hollow each time? Does she talk them in her sleep?
I haven't any answers. All I know is she's a beauty -- silent, distant, close, unattainable, permanent for only this frozen moment, then fleeting right after.

Leaving Laredo

Driving back from Laredo I ran into some heavy fog between Encinal and San Antonio. It was wonderful. There's something calming and pensive about fog.

A tire swing hangs from an old oak tree on a farm near the airport. It's great that there are still places in the city where one can feel far away from it.

Dead of winter

An oak leaf lies on the concrete slab that surrounds the place where I work. Its purpose fulfilled, -- converting sunlight into energy for the stately oak it hung on -- it's now tossed about to and fro at the whim of the wind. Its once green color, turned to yellow, then to red, then it lost its grip on the branch where it lived its entire life and fell to the ground, a copper, lifeless shape. But even in death it will give life once again, for when the wind (or the leaf blower) pushes it back onto earth, its decay will transform the ground into fertile soil where an acorn might sprout and eventually become a stately oak dressed in beautiful green leaves that will, when their season arrives, turn yellow, then red, then fall to the ground, a copper lifeless shape ...