Second chances.

I love the Brick so much that I am reluctant to put up a picture that will supplant it.  But on my way back to Ohio this afternoon, I did manage to catch the Concrete Statues building--which I think I was wrong to think a barn. In a zoomed in version of this picture, it's possible to see that the building looks more like a house.  It's also possible to see one of the mixer trucks presumably used in the making of the statues that are also visible, just barely, above the yellow flowers of the cressleaf groundsel. 

From the air, this concrete statue complex is even more impressive.

Out to lunch.

After we finished cleaning and fixing things in my mother's kitchen, then boxing up and mailing out a prototype my father is building, my father and I climbed in the car and went to Jonesville, where a little place called the Brick serves the best cheeseburgers I've ever eaten.  I had a cheeseburger in San Francisco last December that was nearly as good as a Brick burger, but that one cost $6.95.  This one was $2.50.  Cheeseburger, potato chips, Coke: simple as that.  I've known for days what I would order the second we sat down at the counter.  We sat side by side and watched a television; we watched the guy at the grill making our burgers; we got our burgers in their paper wrappers; mine was gone in about seven minutes.  We have been eating at the Brick for fifteen years.  It is always as good as the time before, always as good as I imagine it in the time intervening.

How we roll.

When I come home, it's always just in time: here is the dog, begging and fretful and sprawled on my bed and wagging her tail when she has the energy, cadging Pop Tarts and bananas and steak and whatever else she can get; here are my mother and father, who knew me before I was a peanut and who have liked me all the while and who will sit and eat and drink with me and let me be who I'm turning out to be.  And I will go home from here to my other home with my people bolstered in and tucked up within myself.  Where I carry them, that's my home.

And now the dog sleeps, and now I will join her.

On the road again.

For a long time on my drive, I kept to my resolve not to take pictures.  But when I reached the "Concrete Statues Exit 143" barn in southern Indiana and couldn't get the camera out in time to take that perfect shot, I decided enough was enough and that I just wouldn't look at what I was shooting.

Shadowing.