Engaged all over Philadelphia

View Engagement spots in a larger map

These are all the places C and I shared little parts of our engagement celebration in our city. So many little stories. It's too bad the names of all the spots don't show up here, but I also like just seeing them spread out all over.

We have the ring now! It's so beautiful. I love wearing it, and what it represents, and that we chose it together, and that C was nervous to give it to me even though we've been engaged for four months already! I'm excited to tell the stories of how we got here. More to come soon.

Gotta start somewhere/sometime

I've been thinking about blogging. Thinking that it's a good way to keep track of how you feel and what you do while something is happening, instead of trying to recreate and remember everything after that thing is over. Say, hypothetically, after you're all good and married and you want to make a scrapbook. Better that I should blog as we go along so I can keep better notes, a better record.

But the thing is, sometimes for me, remembering without any notes makes for a "better" record, because I tend to forget the bad things that happen along the way. Good thing I have some observant folks in my life who help remind me about things that have happened, and some of them even see patterns of things that I would have missed entirely (or blocked out).

And I can imagine that in the year to come there will be lots of good and happy things, and lots of complicated things to work out, some hard feelings, some tense conversations. All normal in the course of planning a wedding, right? And/Or in the course of forging ahead in life and work and relationships of various kinds.

So here I am. Blogging. We'll see how it goes.

Constructing/deconstructing in the neighborhood

We live in an old building in West Philly that used to be called The Ivan. And in the stairway, there are brick window-shapes all filled in with concrete blocks. They've always seemed mysterious to me - why are there or were there windows into the stairwell? Yesterday C and I were exploring the back side of the building and I saw this double-bricked window on the first floor. The careful art of filling in what was a window.

We live along the trolley track - here's the spiderweb of deconstructing the pavement around the tracks in order to pour it again in a nice, smooth street.


They knocked down an old big house that was next to a big community garden. I'm not sure what's going to go on the two lots now, but for a short while there were these constructions in the midst of the deconstructed house. Love it. They remind me of the cairns that I've seen all around the world, built by a friend near a river in Montana, built by an artist along the coast in Vancouver, built and left at the tops of hills all over.

I love my neighborhood.

Rainy spring days

I was almost to my front door on my way home from work when I saw this duck. Thinking it was a rubber ducky left out in the rain, I tried to pick it up. But it slipped from my fingers, leaving a sticky yellow sugar-film on my fingers. Poor lost peep! Melting in the rain.

Spring only happens because of rain - it makes everything grow and be green. I get that. But still, rainy-all-day days are so hard when I'm trying to emerge from winter into my sunshinier self.