Tuesday, October 29, 2013

To briefly interrupt this on-going discourse on decision making, 3 Scenes from Indiana:

1) The corner of Perrin Avenue and Main Street that my porch overlooks has recently developed a puddle. I noticed it a couple weeks ago and thought it was strange that water was pooling on a single square of sidewalk. I rode my bike around it and went about my business. Last Wednesday I noticed from the porch that some utility people had painted some lines on the street around an area near the sidewalk, blue lines that I suspect map where the water mains are located beneath the pavement. On Thursday there were even more lines, and a few words: OK, OK, OK, OK. On Friday morning, standing with a cup of hot tea I saw a water utility truck parked across the street and I looked at the man at the wheel and he looked back at me. When I came home that evening I found that they had dug up a little patch of street and refilled it with black top. Now there is a crack extending from the patch of blacktop to the curb, and it oozes water constantly. Clean and clear water, and in the street light I can see ripples, quarter inch waves covering this small patch of street.

2)
Little plane! You move
so slow it seems like you might
fall out of the sky.

3) Since July of this Summer, I've been hiking the same stretch of trail on a semi-regular basis. For a while it was hot and full of bug noise. By late August the weeds growing on the East side of the river all of a sudden shot up ten feet high. During the last month I've been looking for signs of Fall and until this weekend hadn't seen much. Tracking progress gradually, over the rusty bridge that crosses the Wabash, though the canopied valley where Burnett's Creek flattens, crossing the creek on the mix of concrete and rock stepping stones, passing under the highway, and climbing the little ridges on my way to the trail's end. I usually bring a snack and book and a notebook, and sometimes I bring some music, and sometimes I bring a friend. The leaves have begun to drop from the highest trees and but most of what I saw was still green. I noticed that the chest high foliage that makes the canopied valley so pleasant was beginning to droop, and as I was walking imagined them gone. I imagined mud, and rain, and eventually imagined snow. I imagined that I would continue walking this patch of trail, and I imagined changing too.