It’s late on an April afternoon, and I’m wondering why drifts of white moths are suddenly floating by my sixth floor window at George Washington University.
Moths? This high up?
I open the window and lean out, listening to police sirens screaming away at the site of the nuclear summit, and they’re petals. They’re thousands of dogwood petals pulled up to the sixth floor by the wind.
They seem in no hurry to settle back to the ground, so I lean against the window sill and consider the cloud suspended at the level of my eye.
Usually what you see flying by here are helicopters and airplanes. Also white birds. Some sort of gull, I think.
Down at ground level, ambulances quietly enter and exit the hospital driveway. The middle of UD‘s view is all about the new skyscraper where the old hospital used to be. The university’s engineering department, down the hall from UD‘s office, follows the construction with great excitement, stapling onto a bulletin board an array of photographs chronicling each stage of the building.
Having taught her classes, UD prepares to walk to the Foggy Bottom metro and go home. She takes her soft black leather notebook in which she will continue to chronicle not the streamlined evolution of skyscrapers but the faltering progression of her life. She’s kept a diary – not University Diaries, just a diary – since she was thirteen.
She calls Mr UD from Metro Center. He doesn’t teach today and will meet her at Grosvenor, the stop closest to their house.
*************************
And there he is, in their bright red car, the car they’ve named Walentynka (Valentine). UD washed Walentynka last weekend, and she’s looking insanely bright red at the moment.
“So David says they’re getting family physician recruitment calls from all sorts of places around the country where they wouldn’t want to live,” UD says, bringing Mr UD up to date on a friend of theirs whose wife has finished a residency. “Quoting David: Some east-bumfuck-back-of-nowhere place where I wouldn’t even want to see healthy people… But it’s a theory of mine [Mr UD cringes in preparation for one of UD‘s theories.] that there are, strictly speaking, no uninteresting places in the world. There are:
1. interesting places;
2. uninteresting places NEAR interesting places; and
3. places interesting by virtue of being uninteresting.”
“Tell me more about the third one.”
“Take Bismarck, North Dakota. Say you had to move to Bismarck, North Dakota. Flat. Underpopulated. Bad weather. Conveniently located just to the north of South Dakota. And yet its very nothingness has inspired, for instance, all those Kathleen Norris books – very interesting books, as it turns out – about the spiritual fascination of nothingness.”
“Let’s buy a house in Bismarck. I’ll check it out on the web. We know absolutely nothing about Bismarck. Right? Absolutely nothing.”
“Absolutely nothing.”
So after dinner at a new Japanese place on the Rockville Pike, we drive home and Mr UD gets to work.
I’m sitting up in bed, gazing at the rather threatening wall of green outside our picture windows (I don’t garden or even cut back very much this part of our acre – it’s the dog’s playground – and the wildlife is really encroaching.), when Mr UD bustles in with the Bismarck results.
“It’s on a river! The Missouri I think. For seven hundred thousand dollars you can get a beautiful house set right on the riverbank. We’re retiring to Bismarck.”
April 15th, 2010 at 7:10AM
Uh, you definitely will want the flood insurance….
April 15th, 2010 at 7:16AM
I wondered about that – vaguely recalled flooding problems in that part of the world. But that’s interesting.
April 15th, 2010 at 9:21AM
Flooding was more a problem in eastern North Dakota, on the Red River of the North, which flows through Fargo and Grand Forks on its way to Canada.
The Missouri, in central N.D., is more controlled by dams, for better or worse.
But I know you are just joking anyway about relocating.
April 15th, 2010 at 11:36AM
When I lived in Minnesota there was a special kind of snow called “snirt”, short for “snow mixed with dirt”, that came from North Dakota.
April 15th, 2010 at 1:38PM
I would think that $700K would buy the biggest house in North Dakota, or else it has a lot of land The bottomlands along the river would probably be good for grazing cattle.
April 15th, 2010 at 2:10PM
That seemed a very high price to me too, Polish Peter. Mr UD swears that’s what it said.
April 15th, 2010 at 6:11PM
“North Dakota — Plenty of Free Parking”
April 16th, 2010 at 6:55AM
They do have dams upstream–but they are hydroelectric dams. The dammers are not happy when they have to slow the flow or shut it off completely, as they had to last year.
April 17th, 2010 at 12:41PM
no. stop. don’t do it. there is no good chinese/thai/vietnamese takeout in small towns or cities under 100,000 in the upper midwest. Don’t do it. Seriously. I’ll trade you for a year. You’ll see.
April 17th, 2010 at 12:42PM
Matt L: Okay, you’ve convinced me. I won’t.