Sunday, September 13, 2009

Naiad

Today is a breathtaking gift of Nature all rolling green with her azure cap and puffy cumulus feathers. Wandering away from my house, I encounter brick-painted, huddling homes from two centuries ago built by immigrant Irish who saved a few pennies and built a new community in a triangle a couple miles removed from the death-stench stockyards of their employment. Today there still exists a few Irish and Poles but now it is mostly comprised of upwardly-moblie Mexican nationals who have yard sales on Saturdays and fiestas on Sundays.

The triangle is bordered by Archer Avenue (formerly the Road to Widow Brown's) which reaches out from Chinatown into the wandering desires of Resurrection Mary. This is the southern border of Mount Pleasant, which settles along the river. The Chicago River is now the home of haunted steel mills and scarred ports. Most of it is vacant although the passing trains graon on their tracks day and night like a grandfather on the porch warning against the transcience of our values.

Here, the river itself is spanned by several suspension bridges still studied today by rapt mechanical engineers. The river, far below me, appears in the sunlight as a chunk of amber hiding in its depths some winged prehistoric creature. With its ornaments of railroad ties and ordered train cars and abandoned factories and graffittied granaries it stands in stark contrast to the lake it flows from -- divorced from natural union by dynamite. Once I visited her here among the broken factories and prarie flowers and I came back with a baby. Once I led a parade to meet her at her contrived lake source and dyed her the color of envy.


I am never far from her for long.

3 comments:

Pelmo said...

I have to agree their is a lot of beauty in the neighborhood. But the peace and tranquility of the farm sure outweighs it.

You do have an eye for beauty just like your mother.

La Sirena said...

Thanks, but I didn't take the pictures -- not as skilled as mom is with photography.

I do enjoy the peace and tranquility of the farm, too.

Indigobusiness said...

Very nice. Tangy, even.

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