I hope you can forgive me for not publishing any text with this photograph when I posted it this morning.  I find it difficult to blog when I’m traveling.  And sometimes it’s more difficult than I expect to explain a photograph’s meaning or appeal.  This one, with its complex array of shades and shapes, is beautiful and engrossing on its own terms.  It’s an almost abstract aesthetic pleasure, contemplating the swirl of low roofs around the crisp black and blue skyscrapers, the scatter of boxy towers each with its own quirks and tonalities.  I enjoy the fact that many of the lower buildings, like the massive red sandstone church in the lower left corner, or what I think must be the convention center at center right, are nearly as distinct and impressive as the taller towers.  The crispness comes from the trees being all bare and dry.  There is a dynamism and beauty here that I don’t associate with Minneapolis at all.

Yet every time I come here, I find something else that I like, whether it’s the Normandy Best Western, the Global Market, the Marquette Hotel, or Minnehaha Falls.  My sister and her family are here, and more recently my parents: I’ve learned to see the city through their eyes.  And sometimes I’ve taken some good photographs, whether of the Como Park Conservatory or the bookstore Wild Rumpus.