Savannah’s one strange place. They’ve kept it as it was when Oglethorpe laid out all the squares – Orleans, Pulaski, Monterey – and they’ve let the oaks and the palms and the moss go wild in the wet air.

Everything’s muddy, muggy, muzzy.

In the middle of the squares immense cistern fountains push more water skyward.

Savannah’s green and gray and silver canopies, its sheltering and embracing branches, seem to keep time at bay. Each mild day rises gradually out of the greenery, and the growing warmth keeps you too at a gradual pace. On Jones Street you have time to notice how the houses glow with the love of people who’ve trained the potted vinca and straightened the liriope leading to the portico. How did they get those tiny leaves to stick to the sides of each one of their steps? How many years for each curve in the topiary next to the pond?

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Now settle down, Savannah says, as you hurry up the shallow steps from the river back to Bay Street. All the time in the world, and it’s too hot to make a race of it.

The river sweats behind you, and you think of the oil in the Gulf and whether it’ll come here and make the gray Savannah black.

Meanwhile, there’s the Sweet Georgia Peach martini you just had back there, on the roof of Rocks on the River; and there’s the big view the roof gave of the white-cabled Talmadge Bridge across to South Carolina.

Even up there, in the too-bright sun, Savannah seemed submerged, the pale marsh grass across the river the outer skin of an invisible deepwater life. We walked, my sister and I, through the Oatland Wildlife Center along the marshes one afternoon, and my eye didn’t want to leave the pale green expanse once I saw an osprey break out of the water. I knew that living along the marshes meant seeing bits of secret life fly out of the depths.

The long green marshes reminded me of Bali’s rice fields.

Savannah was placid everywhere. Along the river, in the squares, on the edge of the marsh. Even shrieking birds angling right down to you from the crepe myrtles seemed part of the soft odd Savannah harmonic. Historic preservation really means please be quiet.

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UD‘s currently angling down in an airplane to Dulles Airport. We’re skimming a massive cloudflow. Now we’ve pierced the clouds and it’s bumpy.

These quick trips to elsewhere are a kind of consciousness-nudge. The mind in its usual rounds is set going differently, and, in some inscrutable way, altered for good.