Today's Count: little red dress

I biked today.  I biked yesterday, the first time this entire year.  That little flavour of normalcy. The sun wanders across a blue deep enough to drown in and turns the stones of the campus buildings honey gold and yellow.  After a cold snap we are enjoying fall.  A real fall, all warm and yellow and blue and breezy like a caress.  And red dresses.  I saw the first one as I rounded out from behind the construction site that has been made of the forest near Arts.  White and red, like a dress from the Wizard of Oz, colour come out of the black and white sequences.  Light on the wind, it swayed.  It was hanging from the tall elms of the avenue of elms that lead to the bowl.  Then I saw another, and another.  The first was the only one with white. All the others were red, bright, deep, black, silk, linen, rayon, cotton, smooth, rough, embroidered, beaded, long, short, wide skirted, slim, open backed, high necked.  All adorning hangers strung with fishing wire from the trees and swaying in the breeze.  What do they mean, asked a young co-worker.  What do you think they mean?  She wasn't sure.  We were at an art gallery last week which displayed and explained its display of paper glued together in blocks.  Left me cold.  But red dresses hanging in the daylight, every variation of women:  red, texture, passion, death, bleeding, restriction, beauty, strength, silent, loud, brilliant, flexible, tethered, but moving.  This has meaning.  And through this meaning walked students and profs, the small colourful people from the daycare, the green velveted university choir.  And me.

New Books

Fall brings in the new books again and this week I have a student perennial:  Microwave-Assisted Sample Preparation for Trace Element Determination (Science QD 139.T7M45 2014):  Pizza.