After a quick Skype with Wend's grandparents, we grabbed toys, packed a lunch, and headed out to Grand Island to go look at wildlife. We're at the very end of the Sandhill Crane migration season, and we saw only a very few cranes, but we did get a little stroll into a couple of acres of prairie. You might not think it (particularly if you don't live here), but it's damned hard to find any prairie left out here on the plains. Still, we saw a thirteen striped ground squirrel, meadowlarks, flickers, plovers, and ducks. Plus: cows. All of this in a steady 30 mph wind.
It seems strange to take a 75 minute car ride to spend an hour or two out of town. We struggle to find other ways to do this engagement with nonhuman nature...or at least push against the overly familiar patterns of our lives.
We also managed to play a few board games, another obsession: Carcassonne, the Castle, and Municipium. Dana managed to work a little bit more on the socks she's knitting as we played.
Let's make this real scattershot. I'm most of the way through Jennifer Boyden's The Mouths of Grazing Things. I'm enjoying the hell out of it. She does some very interesting jarring moments within a recognizable world. Nature, as Tim Morton would be delighted to hear, is a strange stranger.
And the award. Right. Well, it turns out that I won the Lincoln Arts Council's Mayor's Award for Emerging Writers. This comes with a two week stay at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and a stipend. w00t!
Sounds windy out there. Always exciting.
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