I’m having a hard time getting back on the horse here. Everything I wanted to post before Christmas now seems very ambitious. Well, if I’m going to be lazy, there may as well be something going up here while I’m doing it, so without further ado, I present one photo. There was a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, and I had an unanticipated chance to go for a walk. The colours were more vivid than they seem to have been all winter, the clouds were funky, and the scene was neat. I won’t say timeless, because a lot of details will have changed in the sliver of urban skyline over the last couple of hundred years, but on this side of the Atlantic a lot of the spaces have a feel of having been used for the same thing for quite a long time. You can plug your ears against the traffic noise, face away from the road, and connect with those who went before. And by before, I don’t mean the guy who took his dog there for a dump half an hour ago; I mean people who were there in a whole other age. A less idyllic but in some ways lovelier-to-look-at time when we didn’t have vaccines or the internet.
I don’t really need to reiterate that the incredible earthquake devastation in Haiti has hearts breaking around the world. A whole bunch of bloggers are doing comment-fuelled donations to aid charities, from the incredibly popular Pioneer Woman to the quieter but intriguing The Curious Baker.
Savory Sweet Life has a list of a few blogs doing similar donations, though she herself appears to have enough comments to max out the scheme she was running.
For myself, there’s a good chance no one would see this post to leave a comment, so I just made a one-off donation of an amount I was comfortable with (actually a bit more, thanks to all you proactive blogging souls for the inspiration) to Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders) who are out there right now trying to bring some relief. In this day and age it is easier than ever to support those working to relieve suffering wherever it’s found around the globe.
I have a lot to catch up on here in the land of beep. I have thoughts to organize, photos to sort and process, and maybe even things to say. Here’s all I can manage tonight, as I am now officially a pumpkin. It’s the Christmas lights on my parents’ deck, shot through the condensation on the window of what used to be the “screen door” in the wee hours of New Year’s Eve (not New Year’s Day).