Geographic Dissonance

Bright May has arrived in Washington, DC and the city is all flowers and people in tank tops smiling. I bought a bike to ride outside in the streets and put away all my mittens and woolly hats. Meanwhile, I am feeling a bit snowed under by several competing deadlines. I'm learning to mentally dart from one place to the next--this week my mind will be focused on Iceland, the Indian Ocean, then South America, then Russia, and ending with Africa. It's an odd feeling to be sitting at my desk, totally entrenched in one place, looking at the saucy stains on my notebooks and remembering what I was thinking and feeling when I was in that one place, and then get up from my desk and return to sunny spring in Washington. Of course, this all leads to a healthy amount of introspective behavior, but isn't that how blogs originated?

So today I am [my mind is] in Russia. Moscow--to be precise; writing a feature and having these little trickles of memories of that place, most of which involve snow and ice and that poetic humdrum of Russian winter. Meanwhile, the American sun is beating down on the right side of my face in a most un-Russian way. I love this picture because it capture so perfectly the matching hue of sky and ground--two stripes of white--a scene I know all to well from the many winters spent in Eurasia.