Tagged: wonderfulworld

Yesterday, it was so clear you could see forever, and when you’re 15,000 feet up in an airplane on a clear day, you very nearly can. It was overcast in Frankfurt when we took off but as we headed north the clouds dispersed until we were flying over Denmark: lots and lots of very flat land surrounded by lots and lots of water. What struck me most about the sun-slathered landscapes was how foreign the land looked. It didn’t look as if it was LAND. It didn’t look, by the edges of the shorelines, as if it continued down into...

How many species of common birds can you recognize on sight? Besides the flashy obviousities of bluejay, cardinal, hummingbird, oriole and robin, I mean? I’m not really thinking of the songbirds so much or the “little brown jobs” of field and hedge. And I’m not really thinking of the one-hit wonders of flamingo, pelican, parrot or ostrich, either, since I assume those are the ones EVERYONE knows, whether or not they’ve ever actually seen one in real life. There are an awful lot of big birds here in Sweden that I am now on familiar terms with that I had...

No clouds above, the sky is pure pale blue, its hem touched with lavender, with rose, with gold. The sun slants shadows long across the grass. Shadow trees with flickering leaves. Every country road is lined with tall, feather-tassel-topped grasses, bowing in the wind of the car’s passing. They dance a subtle sine-wave both fore and aft. Insects buzz and skip and copulate, it’s their season and they know it, though everything is green and lush, they’ve not eaten their fill yet. Bright red poppies, like drops of blood, like sun-kissed rubies, stitch up the edges of all the fields;...