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Friday Slide Show: Local Variables
12 February 2021
Once upon a time we had a sociology professor who confessed that the name of his faculty touch football team was the Random Variables. We laughed, imagining them running a play. But he was serious. None of them knew what to do except run around.
For the past year, we haven't been running around much as we try to avoid exposing ourselves to the coronavirus. A year ago we took a trip to Santa Barbara for a wedding but since then we've been wandering the same streets in our neighborhood.
You might think of that as a limitation. But a wise photographer once explained, you can spend a long time just walking around the block if you bring a camera.
Last weekend that's exactly what we did.
It was rewarding, too. We noticed things we had never seen before. Like the blooms on a plant we had never seen bloom. Or a schoolyard water fountain that hadn't been used in months. Or a bin full of bottles before the Super Bowl.
It's early in February, the sun still low in the sky and the air quite chilly. Yet we have a wide assortment of blossoms already.
Even the garlic we praised in April of last year in A Tiny Miracle has started to bloom.
Local variables, in short. Random, perhaps, but some things seem to know what wthey're doing. They're just doing it earlier than ever.
