Congratulations Cheryl Kortemeier, the new Decatur City Commissioner for District 2 (my district!). There are a handful of people who show up and work hard at every neighborhood or school event that needs volunteers. Cheryl is one of them. We’re lucky to have her as our rep.
Turnout for this election was enormous. In the last competitive election for this seat in 2019, 1,880 people voted. Cheryl and her opponent, Deanna Jue Sutandi, both received more than 2,000 votes. The population here didn’t double. Enthusiasm for voting did.
Voter enthusiasm in this election is primarily the result of our democracy-enjoying area being fired up about [waves hands in the direction autocrat], but credit to Cheryl and Deanna for being two great candidates who the neighborhood was excited to support.
Like Cheryl, Deanna is someone who volunteers her time and skill for all of us. When I was on PTA, she took the hardest volunteer job (the auction) and was great at it. When she asked me to put a sign in my yard, I was proud to. I hope she runs for something else.
Autumn gets the glory and the cinnamon and nutmeg-flavored coffee drinks, but Atlanta’s best season is late winter. The mornings are cold, the afternoons are warm, the trees are naked.
Andisheh and Timmy join you on your dog walk with thoughts about black birds, a weird ATM, the majesty of bare trees and a great spot for peeing. It’s the episode 1 of Oakhurst Dog Walker’s Companion. Don’t encourage me unless you want an episode 2.
Here’s the short essay in the middle of the podcast, including the images of the river and trees.
Oakhurst in January and February
Oakhurst is never oppressively gray. We have gray days. We have gray weeks. January sits in the middle of our wettest season, so we have more cloudy days than usual.
But Oakhurst is not Seattle, or northern England.
In January our fescue is still green. Trendy exterior paints of 2019 still pop. We still see the blue sky. And even though our days are short, the golden hour can be extra golden in January because the short days make the gold a little more precious.
Still, Januarys are as gray as our not-gray gets
The flowers are nearly all gone. I’m not seeing any azaleas or camellias this January. December’s once in a decade deep freeze seemed to shock them to into actual winter sleep this year.
Daffodil stems and leaves are already poking out, but we’ve got a couple more weeks before they bloom en masse. I saw a solitary daffodil flower early in the month. It looked rough. Poor kid arrived at the party too early.
Even though the colors that can make Oakhurst beautiful are taking PTO this month, gray is ok. There’s beauty in gray, and brown and black.
Our leaf canopy is gone so you can look up at the trees and admire their outline without the leaves in the way.
Point your phone and snap a photo. Make it black and white so you can concentrate on the shape.
A bare tree in Oakhurst.
If the sun isn’t behind you might get a silhouette akin to an intricate pencil drawing. It reminds me of an artist’s rendering of the human nervous system, the trunk is the spine and the most distant branches and twigs, the nerves in the toes and fingers.
Looking up at bare tree branches against the sky also reminds me of satellite images of dry river beds.
The similarity of the shape is uncanny. Maybe that’s because trees and rivers do the same thing. They move water. The difference is, they move them in the opposite direction.
A satellite image of a dry river bed, that happens to be the artwork from one of my favorite albums.
Water on the ground flows downhill from the branches of rivers, the creeks and streams, to trunk of the river. In a tree, water flows up from trunk to branch to leaves, where it’s returned to the clouds as water vapor
It’s only in the satellite age that people like me can clearly see the symmetry between rivers and trees.`
I don’t know enough about religion to name one here, but I’d bet several nature-centric religions understood the symmetry without the benefit of satellites.
“Nature is a language. Can’t you read?” Morrissey said that. He wasn’t talking about trees though.
