What's to be seen on an afternoon's walk? Sights that range from the sublime (seed pod, above) to the, well, mundane problems of every day living (below.)
To report: the weather was springlike; the locale, two alleys and Grove Avenue. (I've always wondered about that name -- was it descriptive of beautiful old trees long gone for wider streets or was it dedicated to a city father (or land developer)?
There was this sign on an alley door; particularly poignant to one who spent her school years in Jacksonville, Florida, where the Seaboard was an important institution.
And, just beyond an alley fence, a tree the surgeons had thoroughly lollypopped. Yet come summer, it will be leafy green and no one will be the wiser.
At the credit union over on Grove Street, the landscape gravel had been carefully raked and carelessly walked upon. But the circle was deliberate. A first cousin of graffiti, I'd say.
I finally got reasonably good pictures of Gene Galazan's latest junkyard horses, part of the recent landscaping at Prescott College. More details in a later post.
Between the sidewalk and the pavement, rocks describe a small watercourse -- the land is slanting toward Butte Creek here.
OK, I couldn't resist doing an arty shot. In fact, I made several pictures of similar plants.
One of the nice things I've discovered about citified aspens is that graffiti artists leave them alone. No initials or hearts -- or historic carvings by Basque shepherds -- on these young trees over at Prescott College.
Now here's something you don't see very often in a mountain town -- an ultra-lightweight racing bike. The standard Prescott bicycle has a beefy frame and fat tires, the better to cope with rocky mountain trails hereabouts.
Which mountains still keep Butte Creek running nicely.
At the CVS drug store on Miller Valley, spring has been declared. I couldn't figure out what purpose the items above serve except to transmit colored light. The plastic angels, of course, are for this year's garden.
I'm more inclined to rely on the ravens than a drugstore marketing man to tell me when spring is on the way. This pair was billing and cooing on a high lamppost; can you imagine these big, raucous birds as a romantic couple? I would expect that the courthouse ravens are already nesting, by the way.
One that I became aware of just this week: the yard of a nearby hillside house is held up by these heavy duty railroad timbers. A very big difference from the popular timbers one buys these days at Home Depot or Lowe's: these are actually the Real Thing. If you look closely, you'll see the cutouts for the plates which held the track to the cross pieces, complete to holes where the spikes did their work. The closeup below tells the complete story.
The age of the timbers really shows if you get close. No doubt many home-owners would love to own such well used antique material, but it's likely that not nearly enough tracks have been decommissioned to supply the potential demand.
Another example of what happens to lumber over time. The structure is an old board and batten shed which apparently has never been painted; I was struck by how the knots remained pale as the wood darkened.
Utility poles may age in different ways. The pecky example above suggests woodpeckers -- but where is the evidence of acorns installed in those holes? Quite a different old age from the pole below.
Speaking of Ghosts of the Past: You find everything, well, nearly everything on the Internet. Today's first f'rinstance, MP3s of British pop music from the early 30s, at The Hot-Dance and Vintage Jazz Pages. Not quite my idea of jazz, but it beats rap any day. And if you really want to show our modern ignorance, take the 1895 8th grade exam at Alone on a Limb. One glance and I realized that the Great Dumbing Down was already well underway when I served time in K-6 in the aught-30s! As final look back, I received a comment just this evening on a 2007 post about my granddotter's art work; GD, in the meantime, has moved on to Science Projects!
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