17 January 2022

Andreae Callanan
The frozen soccer field of a former school. The ground is lumpy with mounds of dry, yellowed grass. Each of the clumps rises up out of a thin layer of snow. The morning sun is low, and the grass clumps cast long blue shadows across the snow's surface, so the field is patterned with patches of gold, blue, and white. In the upper left corner if the image is a flare of light from the sun.
The frozen soccer field of a former school. The ground is lumpy with mounds of dry, yellowed grass. Each of the clumps rises up out of a thin layer of snow. The morning sun is low, and the grass clumps cast long blue shadows across the snow’s surface, so the field is patterned with patches of gold, blue, and white. In the upper left corner if the image is a flare of light from the sun.

Last year, to counteract the effects of working and living under the same roof, I started taking myself on a “fake commute” every morning — a 25 minute walk to work from my house back to my house. Same route every morning, same time. All that got shaken up when one part of my morning path (my favourite part, through the parking lot of an old monastery-turned-hotel) got blocked off by a new fence. It was such a shock to my system that it’s taken me four months to get back to my morning routine. I had to map out a whole new commute in a different direction. I still miss my old walk terribly. This one still needs some fine tuning (there’s a vey aggressive, barky dog tethered to a front step on my current route, and it takes half of the rest of the walk for my jangled nerves to recover), but it has potential.