Mt. Saint Helens
Mt. Rainier & Mt. Adams
I pick the prettiest part of the sky, and I melt into the wind and then into the air, till I’m just soul on a sunbeam.
Richard Bach
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Tags: Quoting
Day Two of my Denver related posts, in honor of my Mama’s birthday! Happy, happy!
We’re starting at home on the giant rocks of my youth. The sight of many a photograph, much mischief, laughter, and games, even a kiss or two!
Close Encounters-type clouds greeted us in Boulder.
The Flatirons
and Chatauqua Park in all their splendor.
We’ll eat, drink, and be merry.
I’ll take a photo on the sly,
enjoy the light, and surprise my parents by ordering a side of green beans. The girl who flushed them down the toilet after sneaking them into her napkin, and after being discovered would thereafter cut them into small pieces and swallow like pills, has grown UP.
Boulder and the Pearl Street Mall, despite being far, far older than I,
remain quite the same. Beautiful brick facades,
the twice daily in their accuracy old clocks,
and eager buskers are just as I remember,
that sense of place that resonates.
Something to practice.
When I was little, and the trees in our yard were not so big, I loved gazing at the “castle” gleaming in the morning light from my bedroom window. When I see it now, I feel eight-years-old and giddy all over again. “The castle!”
Looking back to Boulder, the sky’s bark worse than its bite, at least that day.
Thomson Elementary – you were my school back when the doors were orange. I liked them better that way, more like the tigers we were.
Daddy takes me for a ride in his retirement present and drives like a teenager.
This is where I ran around barefoot, brown as a berry, and eager as the truth, from 1976 until 1993. My first home.
Hi there! I hope you are ready for a slew of Denver photos, peeps. Because they are a-comin’! Starting with a Friday afternoon adventure downtown and over the bridge, with my handsome brothers, walking, talking, lauging, and smiling.
I used to work in the tall building, the Republic Plaza, up above that second black line, on the 36th floor, with stellar views of the city and Front Range. It was a mortgage company, and I was in college, a full-time student, worker bee, and romantic, dating a certain cutie-pie who I am now beyond proud to call the hubster.
On the Sixteenth Street Mall with that fine contrast of old and new.
The piano player had a sweet voice and a light touch on the keys. I tipped her and got a dazzling smile.
A glass elevator with no Chocolate Factory in sight. Too bad.
We are headed just to the left of the church, to a place I spotted on my way to Grandma’s house, roaming the streets in my thumping-bass rental car.
I love architecture and bridges!
Everyone is reaching for the sky
And happy for sunshine.
The Platte River
The sculpture looks like a giant pile of intestines, but is cool, nonetheless.
Live wire, eek!
We’re all fine now.
Horsing around.
Finally made it.
The Colorado flag whips and snaps,
over a small French Bistrot,
Aaron tries the absinthe.
Chris is not so sure.
I am, however. Gimme! Gimme!
Sneaky sister.
I love my brothers!
…
Happy, happy 19th wedding anniversary to me and the hubster! I still get giddy when I think about us, truth be told. Our bright-as-a-penny love, better than just about anything good (kittens!) and sparkly (stars!) and fine (whiskey!). Yup, yup.
…it is sunny and breezy and lovely outside. There were a few tiny-sweet wild strawberries to munch, the peonies are blooming, the spiderwort, too, oh, and foxgloves!
I am recovering from a whirlwind trip to Denver to see friends and family, barely sleep, and drive my rental car 384 miles! So bear with me a bit longer while I gather my wits.
Have a super weekend!
Travel Aftermath
(the latter is also a great Rolling Stones album)
Drinking kombucha, not beer…
Photography is a way of telling what you feel about what you see.
Ansel Adams
Tags: Quoting
Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it — and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you — for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.
Soren Kierkegaard
Tags: Quoting
Panic
3:15 on a Friday morning.
The sky a-glimmer with stars and one half-eaten moon
A peach of Allman Brothers or Eliot fame
- Half a life left -
All that has come before, moments savored and lost.
The ruffling of feathers, picking of carrion, soaring on high.
Caw, caw, caw
Thirty minutes in the dead of night.
The useless prayer to ward off the inevitable
reverberates and infiltrates
to the open-windowed innocent below.
3:17 on a Friday morning
Pondering the peculiarity of a crow cawing in darkness.
The frailty and panic and her own half-eaten peach dripping in the starlit sky.
They are the same.
The stillness
the greying
the joy
the loss.
The promise that is now.
A lullaby before drifting off again.
.
Colleen Sohn
Tags: Poetry
I would like to say something clever right now, but the photo better represents my state of mind: a tad blurry and wonky with questionable subject matter. I shall blame it on the sun and walking and talking and laughing, especially the latter two.
Catching up with this man from my teenage days, Pat, and getting to know his awesome wife, Molly, and one of the sweetest dogs with a head bigger than mine, Valla. We’re in Forest Park here, on the climb back up to the car where we, more accurately, Valla, decided we all needed to rest. Pat commented at the absurdity of a dog bred for life in Africa should start to overheat in Portland, of all places. Pat is like that, clever expressions dropping right and left and making us all laugh, even those of the naughty and perverted variety. I decided that he’s the only person I know that can make almost anything dirty sound funny and bearable, like that scene in Three Men and a Baby when Tom Selleck reads about boxing.
Spending time with this pair was like stumbling upon treasure, where you can’t believe your luck that it was right there, ripe for the picking, and now it is yours. I’m so glad they were in our neck of the woods.
…
That’s the hubster accidentally sneaking into the photo. He met up with friends who hadn’t seen him in a while, whereupon Darin shouted, “Holy shit, it’s Grizzly Greg!” at the beard and took a photo to send to his wife. Actually, I don’t know that this is funny anymore, despite my chuckles, so see paragraph one.
…
Happy Mother’s Day!
…
Happy Birthday, Allison!
…
Congratulations to fellow writer K.B. Dixon for the 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Award Honorable Mention!
This is what it looks like in the garden this morning, the ceanothus a veritable explosion of purple and teeming with bees, the peonies near blooming, grass that heavenly shade of green.
Paris makes her rounds, squinting at the bright light while Milo chases squirrels, coming perilously close. Though when I ask what he would actually DO with an arboreal rat, he gives me that empty look and sulks off like the teenager he is.
The iris are blooming, and the wild strawberries run riot over the south yard.
I love Spring…
“Leroy bet me I couldn’t find a pot of gold at the end, and I told him that was a stupid bet because the rainbow was enough.”
Rita Mae Brown
Tags: Quoting
Hi
Welcome to Under a Red Roof.
I’m Colleen Sohn, writer, poet, dreamer.
I like to take pictures.
I’m a bit silly, love yoga, eating, and good stories, because bad ones are a bummer.
Thanks for stopping by…
My Novel
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