L found five must paint sites in Allegeny and Garrett Counties for her week-long plein air competition: the overlook top of Town Hill on Scenic 40 near Flintstone, an abandoned silk factory in Lonaconing, an abandoned paper mill in Luke, along the Savage River near Avinton and, because I made a wrong turn and accidentally turned around there, at the ridge line of Big Savage Mountain, windmills, giant, up close.
West Augusta be beautiful. Cumberland is shriekingly ghost town gorgeous. Freaking goth gorgeous. Effing Depression gorgeous. The house L will stay in, amazing, we could buy two and a half of them there selling our Cape Cod here, lordy. Sunday's blaze, Long Pond Trail, Green Ridge State Forest:
No report from the breakfast lounge of the Frostburg Quality Inn, I'd forgot how much I hate staying in hotels, we Maine and Michigan in houses, today in my complicity. Besides the orange blazed trail, we hiked trails blazed sky blue, blue blue, white, and red. I fill with as much spiritual wonder over tree blazes as I do over road route signage, old-timers here can vouch. Hey, I seem to be able to write again but all I want to write about is my painting, so no surprise that I paint blazes, I just typed the abridged version why
THE PROBLEM OF ANXIETY
John Ashbery
Fifty years have passed
since I started living in these dark towns
I was telling you about.
Well, not much has changed. I still can't figure out
how to get from the post office to the swings in the park.
Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction,
and my hair is the color of dandelion fluff.
Suppose this poem were about you - would you
put in the things I've carefully left out:
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily
people behave toward each other? Naw, that's
all in some book it seems. For you
I've saved the descriptions of chicken sandwiches,
and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement
from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.