When I came home from vacation, I found spiders in their webs at the bases of my apartment walls and dust on the floor. Fortunately, a friend had come in to water my indoor and outdoor plants during my absence, since there had not been more than a few drops of rain here while I was away. This place endured three days of deluge just a couple of months ago, but August has been very hot and dry. There's always some extreme of weather to complain about.

I found five dried, spent blossoms on "Bucky" the cactus. I knew that I would probably miss one of Bucky's two flowerings, which occur in late summer. My plant-watering friend reported that on the night he had come in to water the plants, he had found Bucky in bloom. His timing was good, since those blooms only last for one night. At least someone was there to witness it.

There are so many household tasks to do after a return from a trip: laundry, bill paying, dusting, spider removal, unpacking, trinket management, and studio preparation. I re-assembled the desktop fountain, filled it, and activated it again, for its eleventh year of trickling. I ordered a lot of new art materials, especially landscape green paints, and I will have to re-arrange a part of my studio area to accommodate them. They have now arrived, and I am in the re-arrangement process. My art studio, as well as yours, can benefit greatly from the wonderful stuff at The Container Store. I will actually give away extra things that I have not used in years. I intend to be artistically efficient, as well as pastoral and astronomical.

The Electron Car needed a bit of work and maintenance after the Pennsylvania-Maryland trip, and that has now been done as well. What remains is the rest of the laundry, which is never-ending, and the dust, which is also never-ending.

Finally I opened my calculus book and got back to the important stuff. I went back to the pages detailing the cumbersome process by which instantaneous velocity is found at any point in a function's output. I wrote the process down in order complete with illustrations of how the substitutions of various quantities work out so that it can be simplified at the end. I wondered whether the orderly Amish did any calculus. After reviewing instantaneous velocity, I will return to the set of limit problems and finish those. Then I will turn the page to the next subject, which is derivatives.

Posted at 11:43 am | link

They're starting the harvest of corn and apples in Pennsylvania, but I have returned home with a harvest not of produce but of images. I returned safely home to my Northern Virginia dwelling with a folder full of 434 (as Windows counted them) digital camera photographs. My vacation mission is accomplished. I now have an extensive library of country imagery: fields, hills, farm buildings, cows, horses, winding tree-shaded lanes, front porches, weathered wood, small towns, and a couple of cats. I managed to avoid taking any pictures of people. I also have sketchbook pages of colored pencil drawings done on site or from very recent memory.

I now have the resources to create a pleasant rural world in art, in the tradition of those landscape painters in Europe and America who portrayed the countryside as benign and friendly, full of picturesque things which gave city people good feelings. I know that this will be a work of the imagination, rather than any "accurate" depiction of reality. Remember from my philosophical essays that myth is reality, too. There will be no manure piles or broken-down trailers in my country-themed art. I plan to paint a series of works using these photographs, as an alternative style of art to my usual geometric hard-edged abstractions. I am interested to see which ones will be more popular, and where. And maybe at some point, if I get a bit daring, I might combine the two styles.

Meanwhile, I'm back to work, and my more or less routine city existence. What did I miss during my vacation? I missed doing math! I opened up my calculus book to find that all my instantaneous velocity problems, and many of my limit problems, had unsolved themselves, so I must work through a couple of them again to get back up to, uh, speed. And I can always think about the vectors of country roads and the curved geometry of rolling hills. "Harvest Home" as a holiday refers to the Autumn Equinox, which is still a month away, but here for you is one of my photographs of a cornfield soon to be harvested, in a world which in memory is already ideal.

Posted at 11:43 am | link

I have passed from Pennsylvania into Maryland, and am currently touring the Hagerstown area. This is in northwest Maryland, just as the state gets very thin on the map. The terrain is hilly, with some higher mountain ridges, part of the northern reach of the Appalachians. This area was one of my destinations when I planned my trip, because east of Hagerstown is a little town called Mount Aetna. As a volcano fan, I just had to see a place in geologically stable Maryland bearing the name (spelled the Classical Greco-Roman way, rather than the familiar "Etna") of the famous volcano in Sicily.

Mount Aetna is reached by a country road, appropriately titled "Mount Aetna Road." I drove southeast from Hagerstown, through the new housing developments which are eating up farmland all over the country, and past some big ugly "McMansions" which are also proliferating in the area. After that, there is still countryside, with old houses and barns and fields and cattle. The road is quite twisty and hilly, and it became less and less traveled as I went further into the countryside. It was a hot, dry day, as all my days have been on this journey, accompanied by the ambient soundtrack of cicadas and crickets.

I kept on going as the road climbed up a hill and into the forest. Finally I reached an intersection on the hillside, with a fire station and a handful of houses. This was Mount Aetna. It wasn't even big enough to be a village, just a place in the road. But there was a sign to identify it.

The forest was gold-green and peaceful, as yet uninvaded by developers and ugly mansions, but there was no Sicilian volcano. What I did discover, down the road, was the very pleasant and inviting Mount Aetna Camp and Retreat Center, which had not only a nature study center, a frog pond, and a small group of horses, but luxury rooms for woodsy getaways. I hope to return there, either by myself or perhaps on retreat with my companions in the Order of St. Michael.

While I was there I met with one of the administrators, who gave me information not only about the retreat camp but about the village and site of Mount Aetna. No one knows quite how it got its name, but he said that the area was known in the past for its foundries and furnaces. The location of the fire station, in fact, had once been a metalworks. The area was a manufacturing site for cannons. I could imagine that some classically trained individual, inspired by the smoke, sparks, and molten metal of the forges, might have named (or re-named) the spot after the fiery, lava-pouring mountain of the distant Mediterranean.

Posted at 11:42 am | link