I’ve been here a week. It would have been a week yesterday, but I spent last Thursday in transit, connecting flights cancelled, and standby to Chicago the next morning on a different airplane than my checked luggage with which I didn’t reconnect until the next day.
It happens to somebody every time. At least I have learned to pack my prescriptions and pajamas and a change or so of clothes in my carry on luggage.
I’m staying with classmates in an apartment this time, instead of the hostel – feeding my need for some silence and solitude and sanity. We are in a high-rise and the view is beautiful. It is warm tonight – well, warm for Chicago in January; it might be near or even above freezing – and not snowing, and the streets below are crawling with late traffic, red tail lights and white head lights, orange street lamps, green traffic signals and the occasional flashing blue police police car. I could go out, but being right here is pretty good – even if the formerly-Sears tower still looks kind of like the gate to Mordor, glistening black with up-lit white horns on top.
I had not ever paid attention to the sculpture installation at the south end of Grant Park, but I am walking past it every day now, and for the life of me I think it looks like a bunch of giant iron pantyhose. I forgot my camera, or I’d take a picture.
I am so grateful for this itinerant community. I will be traveling elsewhere next week, and then back to Chicago at the end of the month, before returning to my usual haunts. We are scattered, but connected: beads of dew glistening on a spider’s web.
The Sand Hill Diary 