Tonight: free tickets to "The 39 Steps;" being asked if we wanted to hear someone make chicken sounds as we were en route to McSorley's; free beer at McSorley's; talked about Canada, Chicago, Ireland, and Alaska at McSorley's; asked repeatedly where I am from (people usually guess Germany for some reason); ate a nutella and peanut butter crepe prepared by a guy from Israel and a guy from Egypt, more talk of travel was had; read "Empire Falls" on the subway. Now, spinning in a yellow dress and drinking cherry beer. It is a good night.

changing of the seasons

There's been an Indian summer these days, the nights warm with clear skies, everyone outside drinking pumpkin beer before the leaves make their final exit. People wore t-shirts today, lots of them, and there was a man singing opera at Grand Central. Tonight, I'm sipping pomegranate tea and watching Northern Exposure and reading Joseph Mitchell's "The Old Hotel." Everything is beautifully small, and I find myself sad and appreciative of the sadness.
It's strange, when someone dies, and I find myself face to face with that ultimate finality of everything. These constant beginnings and endings, I've thought about them my whole life and they make me want to dance with one hand waving free, waving goodbye to a summer that should have already gone.
"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
-The Sheltering Sky
For those who read this blog, I miss you all and I promise to become better at keeping in touch. (Especially Elaine - I'm going to be writing you a very, very long e-mail soon. I promise!)
love,
Anna

memories of my grandmother

I'm not sure what my first memory of my grandmother is. I know she was there, weeks after I was born, helping to take care of me in Palmyra, Virginia, where our neighbors would shoot squirrels and give them to us, leaving us to dry them on our clothes line.
The memories of my grandmother are many and often wrapped in music and art and laughter. She was the one who tried to teach me to play the piano, who encouraged me to pursue art, or whatever the equivalent was to me, who spoke to me of her world travels, of Italy and Sweden and Germany. She was one of the few people who would listen to me when I was a self-righteous teenager; she was the one who woke at 4 a.m., just before we would pull out of the driveway of my grandparents' home in Illinois, to stuff us with toast and cheese and salami. She and my grandfather would stand in the doorway, wave goodbye, and I would cry, even then, even when I was five, because I knew how long it would be until we saw them again.
Waving goodbye to my grandmother now is even harder, because I will never see her again. My grandmother died Tuesday, and I can't really grasp that when I fly into Chicago O'Hare next weekend, she will not be there, waiting for me, ready to tell me about her newest painting or a new rosemalling partner.
I love you, Grandma. I miss you.

to ohio

this is the Low Anthem song I can't stop listening to...

also this one is beautiful - makes me want to be traveling by train to nowhere in particular.

Jackson

Kim and I; the Sugar Shack, which was right down the street from my house and where I definitely ate one too many mozzarella sticks and drank one too many shakes!; the line between winter and fall.

Fremont Lake

Fremont Lake during the first snow of the year.

Pinedale's cow wall, the relatively new visitor's center that incited many meltdowns while I covered tourism board, and more Pinedale...

All of these are pretty self explanatory - the last one is the building where I worked while at the Roundup.

In order: the house in Pinedale where I once lived; Faler's (now called Ridley's?) General Store, where I bought many a frozen pizza; and more Sacred Rim.

Kate pretty much always had a camera in her face...

Kim, her daughter Kate, and Andrew on a hike to Sacred Rim in Wyoming.