Today I visited the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and jumped in.

I was very certainly not supposed to do that.

Lake Union is separated from the Puget Sound by a waterway. In this waterway there is a lock system to negotiate a change in water levels. I'm not positive because I didn't read the placards, but I imagine this is necessary because otherwise the canal would be a currented river that flowed out to sea, and boats would be hard-pressed to make it east, back in the Lake Union, and in turn, Lake Washington.

I could be totally wrong though.

Regardless, the locks are one of the stranger of man made phenomena I have ever seen in action. The boats are channeled into a sort of holding tank; large metal doors shut behind them, watertight. Then some bells begin to ring, and quicker than you might imagine the boats float upwards towards you.

Whenever I take a bath, which these days is not often enough, I enjoy sitting in the tub as it is filling up, and even more when the water is draining out, and some layer of my body is going down the pipes with it.

I jumped over the railing today because I wanted to feel what it was like to swim in water that was rising. Aside from being difficult, in my jeans and hooded sweatshirt, and shockingly cold, the feeling was no different than swimming in a stable body of water. 

The pay off, though, was when the bells stopped ringing and the door opened, and I felt like I had been ushered through by some sentry to a new city

like Venice, that floats on water.

austin kite festival 2013

&

a little taste of summer 

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things

pictured:
- a patchwork quilt slowly taking over the living room and most of my mornings
- messy hair that's growing like a weed
- new additions to our window garden

not pictured:
- three packages all the way from germany
- a new trampoline and the fact that we didn't know what we did with our lives before having one
- talks about even warmer months and longer days spent at the river with friends
- an almost perfected thai tea recipe

i was trying to describe your to someone:

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago.
You don’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen before.

I couldn’t say “Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she’s got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she’s not a movie star…”

I couldn’t say that because you don’t look like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six. It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930′s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids.

The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio.

They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life.

Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings.

The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio “… the President of the United States… “

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio.

That’s how you look to me.

- Richard Brautigan ‘Revenge of the Lawn’

learning something new

*not my images

inspired by: desert sunsets, cotton muslim, the south, orange clay, russet yellows, hand quilting, dye pots, gathering, denim, folklore, walnut husks, waiting, simmering, tired fingers.

i loved you on this day.
i love this memory.