A chatty student, with a hearing guide dog, stood next to me. As we both left the elevator and went outside, I got a good look at her.

Sara Soltani! Her video for the Hillary Clinton campaign was spectacular – I watched it a bunch of times.

“You’re famous!” I said. “I really liked what you did for the campaign.”

She thanked me.

This is the overcast expanse Amazon
has chosen as one of the finalists
for the site of its second headquarters.

It’s in Montgomery County, Maryland,
just down the street from UD‘s Garrett Park.

Whee.

*******************

“We combine rural, urban and suburban lifestyles,” County Executive Ike Leggett said after the finalists were announced Thursday.

What Leggett doesn’t say is that you can get all three lifestyles in the same house. Chez UD sits eight miles from a city, so I guess that makes it suburban. But the immediate world around UD‘s house has itself been urbanizing for years, and in fact it feels quite city-like almost the moment you step outside the barriers (dead end streets everywhere) and trees (GP is an arboretum) her town has created between it and urbanism.

********************

Rural? Last night, while Les UDs were eating dinner, they heard one of their red foxes (there’s long been a den at the top of the hill behind our house) barking and screaming only a few feet away from them.

“Prepare yourself,” UD said to Mr UD. “I think you’re about to hear the squeals of a dying rabbit.”

And right away, there they were, the lurid last moments of a trapped animal. Les UD‘s looked at one another, mildly shocked and distressed, as the killing went on inches from their own Takeout Taxi meal. UD took the occasion to explain to Mr UD that while they can press three buttons and summon great feasts, the fox must find and kill her meal.

Anyway. Rural enough for you?

UD‘s godless little town (it has only a thousand people, roughly sixty percent of whom, in 2010, overcame their “fear of coming out” and identified as having no religion) is way in the HQ2 running.

Soon, instead of walking to the GP Post Office and then through Porcupine Woods, UD and her dog will be looping around massive tree-filled corporate domes. Instead of waiting twenty minutes outside the town’s only restaurant for a table, UD will wait fourteen hours while five thousand people try to eat lunch there all at once.

Yes, life around here will certainly change if we’re chosen for the new Amazon headquarters (it will be a ten minute walk from UD‘s house). Some folks say they’ll move the MARC train station out of GP and onto the new Amazon campus, but UD‘s thinking if stations are that movable she should pitch MARC the idea of a dedicated station down the hill from her backyard, so that UD wouldn’t even have to walk down the block to catch the train but could really literally roll out of bed. UD also anticipates regular feelings of rageful impatience, existential futility, and corrosive irony as she waits for late-arriving Amazon purchases with the realization that hugely looming over her is The Thing Itself.

Les UDs are still in the running for the new Amazon headquarters. They live a hop, skip, and a jump from the site.

… the Old Post Office. Most recently, it was transformed into the Trump Hotel.

Now this.

Architecture is certainly a living thing.

Eve Sedgwick’s devoted brother, my old boyfriend and friend, died seven years ago at the age of 57.

The turn of the year decided me to go to the basement where, over a decade ago, he asked us to store boxes of his books, tapes, clothing, and papers. Time to deal with the books.

I’d already gone through the papers, and sent Eve’s letters and photographs on to her widower, Hal, in New York City; I’d already given David’s clothes to Goodwill. The tightly taped and roped boxes of books, however, daunted me – their physical and emotional weight sat in a dark corner, fit to burst.

Yesterday, out under a winter sky, the sun piercingly clear, I watched a red fox slip across our yard and take the small hill up to our neighbor’s, and this somehow sealed the deal: I’d go down with a sharp pair of scissors and cut the ropes and shelve the books.

**************************

Not everything was a book. There
was a colorful, wonderful, untouched
Indonesian journal, in which I’ll
write lecture notes for this
semester’s classes.

There were 36 Heroes of the
Blues cards.

David’s mother inscribed a copy
of Orwell’s writings to him.

A Straussian in his teens, David
held on to this 1967 pamphlet.

At the end of the copy of A Dialogue
on Love that his sister gave him, she writes:

It never seems sensible to pass along moral injunctions.
I sometimes think that beyond the Golden Rule,

the only one that matters is this:
If you can
be happy, you should.

“Since 1009 is a prime number, there are only four numbers that divide 2018: 1, 2, 1009, and 2018.”

… as she does every December,
for a Polish Christmas.

Blogging continues unhindered.

… in the 2012 derecho…

… turkey tail fungus.

Just heard from the NPR reporter that the Garrett Park segment of the Ferdinand the Bull report for tomorrow morning got edited out. So I won’t be appearing.

Snapshot from Home.

… this painting is now on sale.

**************

That was quick. Sold.

… if you’d like to hear UD talk about what it’s like to live in Munro Leaf’s house. (This assumes any of my comments survive editing.)