Frosted leaves, Iowa City

One morning last fall, I went for a walk by the river in a land of perfectly frosted leaves and grasses.

Painting with light, deCordova Sculpture Garden, Lincoln, Massachusetts

At the deCordova sculpture gardens, just outside of Boston, they had an interactive exhibit for kids, which let you "paint" with light and shadow, water, texture, and other things.

Massive prism, deCordova Sculpture Garden, Lincoln, Massachusetts

Just outside of Boston, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, is one of our favorite places, the deCordova sculpture garden.  Scattered across a sprawling set of grounds, in and out of the woods beside a lake a public lands, deCordova presents a slowly shifting collection of sometimes challenging contemporary works.  Honestly, many of the pieces that they show do not do much for me, but others often do, and I'm much happier to be seeing them taking interesting risks than simply playing safe.  I also have fond memories of picnicking there and napping in the shade with my infant daughter draped across my chest.

Pentagon at night

One of the things that I love about taking off from National Airport in DC is that the requirements that the plane not fly too near sensitive buildings means that Northbound takeoffs send you right up the center of the Potomac with all the sights of Washington laid out on either side of the plane.  This isn't a great picture---the vibration of the airplane does not mix well with slow shutter speed---but it's the best I've got so far, and I like the composition.

Construction by the Iowa River, Iowa City

I've been enjoying watching this construction project rise beside the river.  Most days, I take a walk around noon, and my path typically takes me past this building where it can show me all the patterns of props and reinforcements.  If I were more organized, I might have set up to do some sort of time lapse, but I have not been.

Nature lesson

My three-and-a-half year old daughter and I were visiting family in Maine and went out to a park.  As we were talking, we came past these two, who were scrambling all around and making quite a lot of noise, and so of course we had to stop and watch and answer questions.

There's a book I've found very useful as a parent, recommended to me by my awesome aunt, called "Talk To Me First."  Its basic premise is that the cultural notion of "the talk" about sex, bodies, etc., is a bad idea, because kids have different questions and appropriate incremental levels of knowledge pretty much throughout their childhood and development.  The place where parents get into trouble, according to its view, is reacting too strongly based on their own relationship to these topics: either flinch away from encounters with these questions, putting them off for later, or else dive too deep and overwhelm their child; either reaction teaches a kid that this is a touchy and problematic subject that they probably shouldn't talk with their parents about.

I find this very helpful to think about, and it means we can notice the squirrels, I can simply explain to my daughter that no, they're not fighting, they're mating in order to make more squirrels, and we can go on about our day, incremental knowledge gained and another little bit of groundwork laid for dealing with much higher stakes topics later in childhood.

Grant Wood's Revenge

Another bit of toilet humor: being in Iowa, Grant Wood looms up occasionally as a somewhat ambiguous cultural icon, his work having been received much less well at home than elsewhere in the nation.  In the current renovations ongoing at the Eastern Iowa Airport, one of the odder decisions has been to install a massive mural of American Gothic in the entrance to the outside-security Men's Room.  From straight on, it looks more reasonable, but every arriving traveller who walks out of security sees it at this angle, her dour and disapproving gaze challenging you: how much do you really need to go?