There's No Good Way To End

As you could imagine, packing a studio and apartment into a truck, then driving it over 1250 miles of cold highway under the gun of a brewing snow storm, and finally unloading the eleven hundred seventy six cubic feet of deeply frozen objects in subzero temperatures, left little room for blogging. I was fortunate to have Matt, friend and artist I met long ago at Skowhegan, help me pack the apartment and half the studio into the truck on New Year's Eve. Big thanks go to friends of two decades, Mark and Shelly, who kept me well fed and rested after the apartment became unusable New Year's Eve through the second of January, Andy and Rachel who threw us a never-ending party the Saturday before, Mark, again, for copiloting my drive of two days, then carefully hustling things into and out of the house all through a blustery, subzero snowstorm, Marie for her generous tribute on her blog, and Sara, who has been cleaning and organizing hundreds of items into categories of keep, yard sale, auction, and trash.

So, nearly two weeks after that balmy Saturday walk around Prospect Park's lake, I can sneak a few moments from the cleaning, the disposition of a lifetime of things, the organizational relating of new, old and less so, to move this blog ever closer to the present moment...

Forsythia, having had a cold November, thought December must be spring.

The lake was in fine form.

On its south side, newly laid plastic to smother view-killing phragmites. 

Because the lake is all for the seeing of it.

Inspiring towers to go up, as they are beginning to, around Prospect's most affordable corner.

As expected, the new skating rink is immensely popular.

Many new people are visiting, leading to much needed, improved maintenance on the south side of the lake and ever more likely are towers to surround it.

But the beauty of Prospect Park is the ability to disappear into it, to disappear the city around it.

Yet all agency is marshaled toward development for the wealthiest and all too often in the name of preserving what is intended to benefit all.