Today was one of those days on which all the undergrads take themselves – along with their odd clothes, their work ethics, and their unusual hairstyles – away from campus on the big white Northfield Lines buses.
Sad.
On the plus side, though, there’s no competition for space at the bike rack now. I think my bike’s a little lonely.
Some pictures of the day…
My ride to and from Faribault was a lot of fun, though now I have fried legs and a vicious, bizarre sunburn: the tops of the middle third of each arm. The skin is roughly the color of the roof of this lovely little barn along the route. From the spot where I took this picture, I could see two horses, a herd of cows, a donkey, and a bunch of chickens. It was like a Richard Scarry drawing of a farm, come to life.
My ride also gave me a great semi-marcelled hairdo, thanks to copious sweating and my three-vent helmet:
Here’s my wonderful six year old, all dressed up for school this morning (and about to tuck into the delicious pancakes her mother made). It was a great, great day.
Tomorrow, Julia turns six years old – and not a moment too soon for this smart, funny, adorable, independent-minded little girl. She’s been looking forward to this birthday for a long, long time.
I won’t comment at any length on the sheer weirdness and wonder of this kindergartner being the same creature as the tiny pink baby that struggled to be born six years ago – except to say that it’s been amazing and to post this updated collection of photos of Julia on (or near) her six birthdays. (I ran a slightly smaller version of this set in a blog post last year.)
The girls climbing a big pile of grassy dirt in our subdivision.
As if to rebuke me for confessing that I love trees more than skies, tonight’s Northfield sky is one-in-a-million spectacular: a massive rainbow to the east (with lightning at no extra charge!), an amazing sunset to the west…
Packing our traditional Memorial Day haul of flowers into the car this morning, I looked up at the wide-open sky, a dome of blues that ranged from the pale robin’s-egg along the horizons to a deep navy straight above. The only break in the blue was a single cloud, a rectangular mass with lateral corrugations. By the time we got home, twenty minutes later, even that interruption of the sky had dissipated.
I love the dominance of the sky here in Northfield: the blue skies are wonderful, the massive cloud banks are magnificent, and we see some incredible sunsets. But I’m still not used to seeing so much sky above me. Growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I only saw this much sky when I was near Lake Superior, and there the sky was overmatched by the lake, which itself was bounded by an evergreen wall.
Inland – in and around the towns where I lived, Daggett, Ironwood, Hancock – the sky was mostly something you either saw in ragged shards through the trees, if the trees let you see the sky at all, or at vertical swatches of blue at the far end of the highway, the powerline cut, the train tracks… If I had to distill this experience to a single memory, I would choose the time I was sitting, as a little kid, outside our one-room “hunting camp” north of Ironwood and looking through the gap in the trees over the cabin at a small patch of nighttime sky that was equally starry and blue-black. The rest of the seen world, all around, was composed of black and gray trees, swaying in the winds off the lake, not too far away. It was scary and thrilling and comfortable all at once.
Even though those boreal experiences were now half my life ago, I still feel like I should see trees when I look up, and that I should see masses of trees – stands, copses, woods, forests – when I look around, not flat or rolling fields and this prairie sky. This is one of the reasons that I love Carleton’s Arboretum so much. Not much of it is truly wooded, but there are at least a few places (especially way back in the northeastern corner, as far from campus as you can get) where you can feel, at least for a few steps, overwhelmed by the trees – conifers that aren’t native to this area but that remind me of the expanses of forest at home.
The combination of our maple tree shedding its seeds, heavy rains, and strong winds created this odd little scene at the end of our downspout.
This sign, on a trail in Carleton’s Arb near the Rec Center, has borne this bit of editorializing about Carleton’s now-retiring president, Rob Oden, for as long as I’ve been working at Carleton. I wonder if the author of this graffito will return to modify it for the new president, Steve Poskanzer? (Click through for a more legible full-sized image.)
Spotted on my ride home this afternoon: the peaks of the college’s Skinner Memorial Chapel through the leafed-out trees…
Six little goslings feeding under the watchful eyes of mama goose and daddy goose on the banks of Upper Lyman Lake on the Carleton College campus. Two other goose families – one with six more goslings, the other with four – were nearby, and at least two duck families were paddling on the lake. It’s waterfowl paradise on campus right now.
Today I helped chaperone Genevieve’s first field trip, a rainy but fun outing to River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota. We luckily avoided the day’s real downpours, and honestly the steady drizzle added something to the spring-ness of the place. The greens were GREEN, the mud was MUD, and the kids were HAPPY. Vivi even took a big digger, but popped right up again to show me her muddy hands (see the slideshow). A great, great time.
Walking home from work today through the misty, I saw a magnificent great blue heron, stalking frogs in a creek that runs through campus. I couldn’t get very good pictures of it, but it was amazing. What an elegant bird, both wading in the shallow water and, after I
got too close, flying easily away down the creek. Three photos and a short video…
Great Blue Heron from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.