Words, wool, daydreaming, cooking, crafts, and books (or do those count as “words” too?)
When you pass a sign for Font Hill Drive, and think, wow… wonder what the hill looked like with all those italics, Times Roman, Arial, Helvetica, and Bookman crammed beneath it? Maybe a monument to printing? Anyone else read the Phantom Tollbooth and think it didn’t go quite far enough?
Oh yeah… it’s gonna be a loooooong week.
I’m not talking about the KANE is Able truck signs (although they make me smile with this slogan that sounds like a Biblical joke), the Batesville Casket Company logo with its green tree or the Leidy logo (which I remember in its pre-2003 incarnation, with Leidy in the shape of a pig). I’ve shared my drive with all three of these.
I’m talking about homegrown slogans with hand-drawn letters (or reflective letters lovingly glued to the side of a truck. Recently I saw two:
I’ve seen hand-painted logos from team sports, marijuana leaves on the back of a city trash truck, and a Pinto painted a pink most often found in the medicine cabinet.
So, seen any fun signs on trucks or cars while you fight the fumes of the morning commute? I’ll keep watching. It makes a welcome break in the day when I find something as fun as a yellow rubber ducky stuck on the end of someone’s antenna.
Every morning and evening, my commute takes me past a gateway for two houses, and on top of one of the gateposts has been a cement lion. The gatepost on the right has been empty, but an identical lion has been hidden behind the brick wall in front of the house on the right. I could see this lion cowering on my trip homeward bound.
For half a year, it has been this way, as though one lion tired of looking out across the orchard to the east, and decided to sulk behind the brick wall. Or, perhaps a fear of heights?
Today, both lions are cemented firmly in place, both staring off in the distance over an orchard and a herd of brown cattle. I like to think the other one teased the one down on the ground until he got the gumption to get back up there. But then again, my commute is long enough to write books in my head, and whimsy keeps me alert and looking for interesting items as I pass by them. I’ll miss the cowering lion, but I’ll wonder for a while why both lions on top of a gate are less intriguing than one up high and one down below.
Sometimes, if you’re driving in the early evening and it’s foggy, you will see birds or deer in the gloaming, and the effect is almost grainy, like a bit of old film.
One night, while heading south on 83 into northern Baltimore, I stopped at Northern Parkway and waited at the light. The fog was lit up by 83 below the other side of the bridge. And in the dusky sky, lit from below by yellow and white car lights speeding like search beams, were a hundred or so sharp winged swifts darting to catch bugs in the evening. The ones backlit and closest to my intersection were in sharp relief, but the ones in the background were almost like stop reel animation.
I’m looking for inspiration for the new cycle in Project Spectrum, which is yellow, air, East, and wood and Spring. This visual event was magically brief, but I’m not sure how to translate it into the project (beyond getting out my woodcutting tools and doing a printer’s block of the scene).
This whole week has felt like this photo. Gloomy, filled with overcast skies, and then rain. It’s reminded me of when I lived next to a creek and as I would drive home at night during heavy spring rains, frogs jumped on my windshield and then jumped into the dark fields nearby.
My environment isn’t that rustic now, but I have the excitement of avoiding pedestrians who are darting back and forth on the yellow line in the middle of 4-lane highways. In pitch blackness, it’s a challenge.
These days I’m fascinated how light catches the bare trees and outlines the bark so you can see it from a vast distance. Sadly, I’m normally without camera when this happens. Just as I was without a camera when I saw a double rainbow and 3 turkey vultures serenely flying over a parking garage in a suburb of DC on Tuesday night. And then the skies opened up and there was golf sized hail on my windshield (but no frogs or pedestrians, thank heaven)!
I was driving up a one way street in the evening, past the Basilica, when I stopped for a red light. A movement on the left, from behind the Basilica, caught my eye.
He came down the access alleyway, an African American man on a bicycle, possibly coming home from a late night at work. His mouth was set in a line beneath a pencil thin mustache. He was wearing a dark grey tweed driving hat, dark pea coat, a scarf, and slacks the color of the charcoal night. He seemed to have spent more care on his appearance than is common now. As though he was going on a romantic assignation, or merely wanted to connect with a more genteel time, without looking overdressed.
I sat and watched as he glided silently on his bicycle toward the stopped traffic, passed the black gates with gold tips, and turned right. As he glided off the wrong way on the one way street, I sat and thought about how timeless people could appear, as though equipped to step across the frame of forward moving time.
And then the light changed, and I drove off toward the moonlit streets and flowered trees of the park in front of me.
No funny long johns with a cape for this guy. Just one guy garbed in a white Oxford shirt, dark brown tie, and a sandy tan suit gamely moving his stalled Subaru out of the line of passing traffic on the Washington DC Outer Loop. His car stalled in the far left, passing lane, and he had it in neutral and was moving it with one foot, step after step back onto the shoulder and against the Jersey barrier. Meanwhile cars and trucks zoomed up behind him, stopping short with squealing brakes, and then speeding around him honking. I would have lost my little mind trying to do that.
Not quite Superman, but an extraordinary, ordinary man. Amazing how ordinary people have strengths you don’t expect.
And I should do the same. Ravelry has an error message up now, and my brain sadly creates sonnets in my head.
Sounds like the weekend will contain no knitting, Philadelphia Garden Show, or downtime but fun family things. That is if EDX, the wounded car will allow me to get to them. Nothing like an entire 45 mile drive through the dark, listening to your car struggle to get up to 50 mph while cursing the place that “fixed” my car.
So, how ’bout you? Anything fun planned?
Over a sound barrier wall on the Outer Loop around Washington, DC there’s a tattered, faded pirate flag that flaps in the breeze. I only see it if the wind is just right and traffic isn’t heavy and shifting.
One corner has ripped mostly off, and it’s faded from exposure to the elements. But every time I see it, I wonder if it was raised by a Dad decorating a child’s treehouse, someone reliving a second childhood, or a Pittsburgh Pirates fan (unlikely since it isn’t the team logo).
Perhaps Pirates lurk in the rugged underbelly of suburbia, flying the Jolly Roger and running raids. If the Pirates of the Subdivision decide to board your house, you’ll have to walk the plank. Although I have heard rumors that sugar cookies are an acceptable ransom.
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