Another American Adventure: meanwhile ...

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

meanwhile ...

Meanwhile the weather in Florida continues to be warm and sunny. Jubilee suns herself in the very same place that our previous dogs and cats chose.

Downtown West Palm Beach on Sunday morning ...

The curious little black ducks with metallic beaks that come to our canal for a few weeks every winter. I'll try to get a better photo of them. They're still here, but could leave any day.

2 comments:

BarbaraFebruary 1, 2013 at 1:38 PM
Amazing how deserted West Palm Beach is on a Sunday morning. Don't they have brunch-oriented restaurants? churches? bakeries? Is everyone sleeping in?
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beth cioffolettiFebruary 2, 2013 at 10:43 AM
This particular portion of WPB is strictly a M-F, dead on weekends part. The court house is on the right, which brings in a daily (M-F) influx of commuters. There may have been more activity down near the waterfront, where there are some restaurants and Churches. I was on my way over to Palm Beach to give a computer lesson. There is definitely more activity over there where every day is a "leisure" day, with outdoor cafes, bike riders. Even during the summer there is much more going on over there. Interestingly Palm Beach is called a "Town" around here, whereas WPB is a "city". There are large areas around here that I call the "Vast Honky Tonk Wasteland" - strip mall after strip mall, congested with traffic. You take your life in your hands to just walk down the sidewalks - yet there always seem to be pan-handlers on the street corners (or even in the middle of lanes of traffic) ...
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.