Sure, you can buy the $1,500 crystal vases and $99 place settings from the display cases shuffled among the relics. Of course you can buy them — it’s a store, from the top floor of bedding sets down to the entrance where soaps, candles and other heavily potpourried toilet decorations mace you with scent when you walk off the street.

Among the three stories of designer corkscrews and Persian-inspired throw rugs that define the downtown Bloomingdale’s home store, only the two glass cabinets are off limits. More than Orrefors or Simon Pearce crystalware, they contain the truly valuable.

Fezzes. Badges. Photos of clowns.

For all Chicago’s famed modernism, where architects with Teutonic surnames huddle and gab to design glass-box skyscrapers each more glassy and boxy with the last, some of the most charming moments of city life come when a structure finds life beyond its original purpose. Then you get law offices in old firehouses, art galleries in pre-Fire water towers.

Or a Bloomingdale’s in a converted amphitheater for the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine.

This building was built by the Shriners — think fezzes, little cars, and children’s hospitals — in 1912 as the Medinah Temple, a 4,200-seat stadium for circuses and other events put on by the fraternal group. Noted for its faux-Moorish architecture and gigantic onion domes, which spent decades off the structure before being re-created and put back atop during a 2003 redevelopment, the building is as gorgeous inside as out, with a vaulted dome ceiling, stained glass windows, and two second-floor display cabinets of programs, photos and clown-laden mementoes of the decades of circus.

Here you can step away from the hustle, bustle and hurly-burly of downtown life. Here you can step aside and find yourself among domes, stained glass, a stories-tall stage curtain that still lines the proscenium, which these days separates the shopping area from the stockroom.

And you can find the cabinets.

Photos of massive brass bands filling the hall. Old issues of the “Fez Sez” Shriner newspaper. Commemorative plates, windbreakers, hats and playbills from shrining past. It’s not quite a museum, barely an exhibit.

“Sometimes you need an oasis in big cities,” former Mayor Richard M. Daley said when he started the morally and legally dubious tax-increment financing that saved the structure from a developer’s wrecking ball.

The Tribune was less convinced Daley’s motives were pure, accusing the mayor of using the popular local icon to score political points.

“Ever seen a theatrical routine in which the comely female assistant is rescued from life-threatening peril at the last second? Of course you have. It’s a vaudeville staple,” they wrote in a 1999 editorial.

But whether the building designated low-income to fund high-income shopping was saved to be oasis or vaudeville, it was saved. We have a hidden spot in Chicago with cabinets of clown. We have a place to step away, get maced by candle-scent and gently glance at an otherwise-lost history. It exists. It is.

The story could end here, but it won’t. Macy’s is looking to unload the place, sell off the onion domes and proscenium curtain and move all the candles, corkscrews and bedding to their main location at the former Marshall Field’s. The building won’t be torn down — Daley also secured landmark status as part of his crusade (or political gameplay). The building will be here, but I can’t say what will happen inside.

This is my call to the new owner, whomever you might be: Please save the clowns. Whatever new use you find for the place, be it store, office, museum or chain restaurant, please keep the contents of those cabinets safe.

Just save a touch of the past among your future. Just a nod, just an old circus program or fez. We have too much future in this town of Teutonic glass box. Please save the past, just a cabinet or two.

Buy your tickets now at Dabble.co.

The corruption tour, for those of you who don’t know, is my yearly wander through downtown Chicago taking tourists through the spots where corruption happened in the city.

Bribes, shady land deals, kickbacks, bad-faith contracts, systemic racism and just plain being a jerk in office have done more damage to this city than any Valentine’s Massacre or thrill-killing U of C grads, so why let the Capone tours have all the fun? I lure the punters in with promises of Blago wackiness and leave ‘em with a hefty dose of civics. It’s fun.

Each year, the tour gives half the tips to a local nonprofit journalism group. In part it’s a way to give back to this city, in part it’s to allay my guilt at making a personal profit off Chicago’s legacy of corruption, in part it’s a way to casually mention I do accept tips.

The first year, the money went to City Bureau. Please donate to them.

The second year, ProPublica Illinois. Please donate to them too.

This year the money will go to The TRiiBE, helping them provide a voice for and change the narrative of black Chicago. Donate to them, donate to them, donate to them and save some money for Injustice Watch, which I’m planning on giving the share of 2019 tour gratuities to.

I like The TRiiBE because they’re writing stories no one else is, and giving a community historically underrepresented in Chicago journalism its own voice and platform. But I’m not the best person to talk about the work they do. They are.

So hopefully, you’ll join me and wander among the exhibits that make up the museum of corruption we call Chicago. I’ll keep a spot for you.

Harley was reading about 1920s bohemian hot spot The Dil Pickle Club for the Chicago Metro History Fair, a project of the Chicago History Museum that turns students in grades six to 12 into historians by making them research and present on Chicago and Illinois history. She or he (Harley like a 1990s villainess or like an 1890s vice admiral?) had come across a blog post of mine about the club and wanted to know where one could find out more about the Pickles.

First, Harley, I’m impressed. I never would have reached out to anyone for a project at that age. That level of initiative will carry you far in life.

Second, it’ll carry you a lot farther if next time you remember to leave some contact information.

So rather than try to track down a lone schoolkid somewhere in northeast Illinois, here’s a story directed at one person, but on a snowlocked morning meant for all. Here’s a quick and dirty guide for finding out what you want to know about Chicago history, including about one of the weirdest, wildest clubs the city ever knew.

Caveat

I am not a historian in any capacity, just a journalist who really, really likes history and has a surprising amount of free time. If you find conflicting advice on research methods from more reputable sources, good lord do that instead.

Chicago Public Library

It’s quick and easy, Harley, and number one with a bullet. Books, my friend, books.

Or actually book. This seems to be the only one that pops up specifically on the Dill Pickle Club, but once you start finding the names of habitues, look up books by or about them. Once you find dates of big Pickle-y events, you can start fishing through the microfilm at the Harold Washington Library to see what the newspapers of the time said. Just have someone at the microfilm room desk show you how to load the film first.

The library’s digital collection is quite good too, with odds and ends about the club starting with its “quiet” christening. You don’t have to leave your room for that one (but leave the room anyway. No one likes a lazy researcher and a skill set limited to “I googled this” is only going to get you so far.)

Other places for books

Most local independent bookshops have a “Chicago” or “Local” section. Chain bookstores do too, but if I’m giving you this free advice I’m going to indoctrinate you into my cult of shopping local. They need your money more than Amazon does. If you need to order online, use Powell’s.

If you can find a copy, I recommend “The Rise & Fall of the Dill Pickle Club” by Franklin Rosemont. I don’t know if you want to spend money on this, but it’s a fun read compiling old articles and interviews about the club.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for at a library or bookstore, give Google Books a search. They might have digitized it, they might not have, they might have digitized it and not released it, but it’s worth a shot. Project Gutenberg, Hathitrust and Archive.org are other good places to look for digital copies of books.

Chicago Collections Consortium

You want photos? They got photos.

And a handy guide to basic research concepts. Fun! Or at least probably going to look good on your history fair report!

The Newberry

Here you go, Harley, the big one. It’s one thing to read the people who read the things that the people who were there wrote, but how about you flip through old posters, read old invoices and programs for the events, handle Jack Jones’ own drawings of the Du-Dil-Duk that brings good luck.

(That last part of the sentence will probably make more sense after you get a bit into the research. Du-Dil-Duk. It’s delightful.)

The stately old Newberry library the throw of a stone away from the now-alley where the Pickles once raged has a massive collection of source documents and artifacts related to the club, both from the club itself and in the papers of the various writers and artists who frequented the place. Wonderful resource.

You didn’t mention your age in your comment on my portfolio site, but if you’re in high school or older than 14, it’s easy to obtain a reader’s card. If you’re younger than that, the Newberry still loves you, but they won’t let you thumb through the paperwork. Younger researchers can use the library’s email and phone services, plus talk to any of their librarians to see if there are other options.

In sum

So that’s it, Harley. That’s what I’ve got on how to find stuff out. None of this will make you a research historian — I’m not one so how could I teach you to be? — but there’s something quite lovely about not having to limit yourself.

Right now you, I and all the people reading this are limited by what we’re given. We’re presented a few articles, a dictionary definition, a blog post focusing on factoids without context, a textbook that strips out the stuff the school board thought will make you unmanageable — we’re presented a sanitized version of history that takes away all the uncomfortable, inconvenient and weird.

Isn’t it nice to be able to peek beyond that? Whatever happens with history fairs or classes or Dill Pickles and associated Du-Dil-Duks, isn’t it nice to have a few tricks that maybe possibly could help you suss out what really was?

I find it pleasant at least. And, Harley, when you win this history fair thing, I get half the trophy.

Read about my favorite high school teacher

How I spent my HS reunion

My historical Holy Grail

The place was designed for the young, the beer pong table and oversized Jenga tower attested, but at this early hour it was inhabited by the old. The guys at the bar talking wildly and broadly to pack in as much mock drunkness and youth as possible before their wives call them home for supper, old. The white-haired drinker at the end of the bar, silent but for the occasional gloomy sigh as he stared into nothing, real old.

And the bartender was old, thick Chicago accent that caused me to code switch into my own Chik-kahgo Guy ever so slightly as I ordered a beer to wash down my pita-meat.

I nestled by a window to watch snow glimmer over neon and sexless forms wrapped in scarf and hood hustle down the sidewalk. This was it. This was the place. This mixture of old men in a young bar, of desperation on a poor slip of a rich neighborhood, this sandwich ne’er before seen in my lifetime was a perfect, patented, ready-made 1,001 Chicago Afternoons story.

But first I just need to check something on my phone. 

After years of holding out, I finally caved to the world and got an iPhone. I was tired of group texts coming in jumbled and out of order on my little square gizmo where the keypad snapped out. There were other reasons — I get lost a lot — but the group texts were the big one.

Two separate friends quipped “Welcome to 2008″ when they found out.

I still don’t like it. I don’t like that coworkers who have had iPhones for years didn’t believe me about some of the stuff in the Apple terms of service (they sell your physical location in space), I don’t like how much I paid to fund violence in Africa through coltan mining, I don’t like how every conversation about privacy and the melding of corporations into the sphere of personal relationships ends up with two blinks from the other party and “You can turn off location services.”

And I hate that I cannot put this thing down. Even when trying to eat a burger-on-a-pita at a bar that screamed “story.”

I tried to daydream about the office workers hustling home past snowy windows and sent off a work email instead. I tried to linger over the taste and texture of a really difficult sandwich to eat and ended up checking Twitter. I texted my parents instead of talking to the white-haired old man and I wondered why friends kept telling me a machine that gives a constant stream of access to the president’s thoughts, words, actions and policies would ease my life.

I would put down the phone in disgust, vowing to envelop myself in the real world, then find it in my hand a few seconds later. I’ve checked it four or five times just since I started writing this story.

Beer and structurally problematic sandwich finished, I decided to take the long way to bowling league. The snow shimmied down the skies, glinting in streetlight like cracked glass. It was beautiful and broken, everything I love about a city.

The bus arrived when the app told me it would. I got on board and found a spot among men and women, boys and girls all hunched over checking their own devices. Bowling was typical. Attention and energy lags and by the third game it’s more a matter of keeping myself entertained while my team hunches over their phones, occasionally mentioning something new that popped up about the governor’s race.

My boss got a strike while playing HQ Trivia. Ball in his right hand, phone in his left. The pins erupted. This was the second time I’d seen him do that.

After bowling, I walked in the snow to the bus stop. An old man with a sturdy brown face and kind eyes poking between scarf and hood joined me. He pulled out his phone and I watched the snow.

I do know everything they saw in Chicago last night was quantifiably better than what I saw.

Their texts and bleeps and bloops were messages to dear loved ones, jokes with good friends. They were listening to the music of artists who inspired them. They educated themselves about gubernatorial races and felt the warmth of puppy photos when I was eating an ungainly sandwich and trying to psych myself up to talk to an old rummy. The life you choose on screen absolutely is better than the one splayed out before you with no rhyme, reason or search function.

But it’s my world of old rummies and weird sandwiches. It’s my world of watching pins topple and wondering what bus patrons are thinking. The kind-eyed man at the bus stop communicated with the loves of his life. I watched Ubers blacken and mush the snow on Western Avenue.

If I had been glued to my phone while I rode the bus home, I would have missed when a face-tatted white boy whose eyes said meth and pain smiled and stooped to pick up a piece of paper an old man dropped. He was the only one to help. I would have missed the teen boys’ laughter behind me, and would have missed each flake I saw glisten among neon.

I don’t want to lose this world but I keep picking up my phone to find a better one. I don’t like that at all.

“D-F-HP?”

“D-F-HP.”

“D-F-HP… D-F-HP… D-F-HP!”

And with that I spit molten acid all over my friend.

I took a day off work on Friday. No purpose other than pleasure, no goal other than rest. So of course, I soon filled it with tasks to meet.

An interview for this site with a South Side flagmaker, speaking to a School of the Art Institute of Chicago class about dark tourism, a few hours at the Harold Washington Library researching what precinct captains’ duties were in the 1930s — this is, unfortunately, how I unwind.

But then there was Mr. Beef. And trying to rip out my friend’s spine or electrocute him with lightning hands.

The friend was A.J. Kane, photographer extraordinare and the guy who shot both the Carroll Street underground expedition and the man single-handedly building an arts center in Englewood. After shooting the flagmaker down in South Chicago, A.J. and I reconvened for a quick lunch downtown.

“Well, there’s Mr. Beef,” A.J. said.

“Oh god yes.”

“Or there’s-”

“No. Mr. Beef.”

Mr. Beef On Orleans is a wonderful little shack on Orleans Street between Erie and Huron. It’s been around since 1979, serving up Italian beef, sausages, hamburgers, subs and presumably other items but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never gotten anything but the Italian beef. I never intend to get anything else there either.

The place pulls off the rare treat in Chicago of knowing its heritage but not slapping you in the face with it. When you walk in to the fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored sandwich shop, the only nods to history are the wall of photographs of famous past eaters and framed news clippings on the wall to your right. No ponderous histories of the place, no menus clad with the Legend of the Founders. It’s a greasy spoon where you order from a long counter to the left, eat at a massive picnic table in the next room and maybe pick up a cannoli on your way out from the little deli stand in the back. No fuss, no muss, no bathrooms.

You go there for the beef.

Like Mr. Beef itself, Italian beef also manages a strong Chicagoana without being all in your face about it. The sandwich was created in Chicago in the 1930s, but doesn’t have the pretension of that big fat tourist pizza or the nose-in-the-air authenticity test of the “proper” local way to garnish a hot dog. (I honestly don’t care if you put ketchup on your hot dog. Large factories extrude pureed critter meat into tube-shaped molds. You’ve already crossed a culinary Rubicon here where you probably shouldn’t get judgy.)

The Italian beef sandwich is seasoned strips of roast beef served au jus on an Italian-style roll. You can get it with hot giardiniera, you can get it with sauteed sweet peppers, you can get it dipped in the au jus sauce or not. The only constant is that you will end up a grease-slathered mess at the end.

Sandwiches in hand and later all over our hands, A.J. and I dine/gorged in the long picnic table in the back room. We chatted. We caught up. We talked about condos and jobs. We talked about photos and families and people we know in common.

And we found out that Mr. Beef On Orleans has an arcade version of Mortal Kombat 4 set to free play. We had been men chatting about futures and real estate purchases. We instantly became boys.

I’m sure someone more savvy than I am has written odes to video games and their effects on men of a certain age. A.J. and I instantly set to killing each other in the grotesque, spine-ripping ways only Mortal Kombat can offer. A.J. pulled up a list of finishing moves on his phone so we could get to the more creative functions of murder — Reptile spitting molten acid, Sub-Zero using his Ice Blast, Sonya ripping men apart with her legs.

In a little shack where juice-drenched sandwiches come sometimes with fries and always with packets of moist towelettes, two men spent a snowy afternoon engaged in acts of loving murder. And that’s the image, that’s the Chicago I want to leave you with today.

More “authentic” Chicagoana

A long-dead restaurant in Bronzeville

And, just for fun, the days of professional pedestrianism

800 Potawatomi warriors danced through the Merchandise Mart, across the old walking bridge that predated the abandoned train track now permanently slung at attention, south past glass towers of law firms and global investment banks, stopping for special performances across the river from the Starbucks and east along Lake Street at the Franklin Self Park, Ronny’s Original Steakhouse at the Thompson Center, and the 7-Eleven at Dearborn.

All were entirely naked, except a strip of cloth around the loins. Their bodies were covered all over with a great variety of brilliant paints. On their faces, particularly, they seemed to have exhausted their art of hideous decoration. Foreheads, cheeks, and noses, were covered with curved stripes of red or vermilion, which were edged with black points, and gave the appearance of a horrid grin over the entire countenance. The long, coarse, black hair, was gathered into scalp-locks on the tops of their heads, and decorated with a profusion of hawk’s and eagle’s feathers, some strung together so as to extend down the back nearly to the ground.

Thus spaketh future Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice John Dean Caton, who watched from the second floor of a hotel just north of what’s now an OK Starbucks along the river.

Not a great Starbucks. An OK one.

In August 1835, the Potawatomi left Illinois. The 1833 Treaty of Chicago, forged in lies and liquor, had given them two years to get the hell out of town.

Although a some individual Potawatomi joined Sauk leader Black Hawk’s uprising in 1832, the tribe en masse had kept out of the conflict, even sending a delegation to Chicago in May of that year to assure the Americans the Potawatomi were on their side. But two days after the delegation, a small band of Sauk crossed the Iowa-Illinois border into American territory and attacked a powerful U.S. detachment of 275 men under the command of Major Isaiah Stillman.

How’d it go? Today it’s known as the Battle of Stillman’s Run.

To save face after the humiliating defeat-and-retreat, an officer fabricated a report that it hadn’t been a small Sauk party they scampered away from, but instead they had been “invaded by a powerful detachment of Indian Warriors of the Sac, Fox, Winibago, and Potawatomii and part of the Kickapoo Nations.”

I can’t claim the officer’s lie was a turning point or if, coupled with rumors of Potawatomi involvement and the generally worsening blood between the tribe and settlers, it was just a convenient excuse. Either way, the U.S. government was done with the Potawatomi. After the Black Hawk War was quashed in August 1832, Congress appointed a commission of three to deal with the Potawatomi and “extinguish Indian title within the states of Indiana, and Illinois and the Territory of Michigan.”

The trio negotiated a deal at Camp Tippecanoe, Indiana, in October, getting all the Potawatomi land in Illinois, plus sections of northern Indiana and Michigan. Part of the deal included merchandise valued at $45,000 paid to the tribe immediately, with another $30,000 in goods to be negotiated by treaty the next year at, you guessed it, Chicago.

Pushed and prodded west over the next year in a forced migration that — like the others — was plagued with disease and incompetence, with resentment growing among Potawatomi who didn’t recognize the deal their leaders cut and settlers angry them Injuns won’t go away so the Whites could farm and build canals, the procession arrived in the future City That Works in the autumn of 1833, months behind schedule and hungry for that promised $30K in goods. A cold winter and the torching of Potawatomi crops by Black Hawk’s army meant the settlers were able to hunker down and starve out the tribe members who didn’t recognize the Camp Tippecanoe treaty, so for many early Chicago whites, this forced delegation would be the last Potawatomi they would ever be.

Chicagoans marked up goods as high as 50 percent for the Potawatomi. Prostitution was rampant. Settlers and French traders flocked to the encampments to get the Potawatomi drunk and take them for all the money they had left from the Camp Tippecanoe payout, along with every single possession they owned.

They had brought some whiskey and given them which soon made them drunk, then some directed their attention while others stole all their goods even taking their last blanket. Many who had 3 or 4 blankets the day before yesterday were naked. They will give anything they have for whiskey and as soon as they are drunk they are stripped to the skin by the whites. Such infernal villainy would make the Devil blush.

– Treaty observer Henry Van Der Bogart.

The sale of alcohol to the Potawatomi was illegal, but the tribe was there to negotiate a treaty. The government found a drunken negotiation partner to be a pliant one and turned a blind eye to the sales.

The sin may lie at the door of the individuals more immediately in contact with them, but for the character of the people as a nation, it should be guarded against, beyond a possibility of transgression. Who will believe that any act, however formally executed by the chiefs, is valid, as long as it is known that whisky was one of the parties to the treaty.

– British traveler Charles J. Latrobe.

Three U.S. officials signed and 77 Potawatomi leaders put X marks on the Treaty of Chicago on Sept. 26, 1833. The refugees from Indiana and other out-of-town points dispersed as soon as they got their payments, eventually leaving only the Potawatomi originally from the Chicago area. The treaty gave them two years to get out.

Their lives in the settlement were spent as prey of bunco, greed, and alcohol, but on an unnamed day in August 1835, the final 800 Potawatomi left Chicago as warriors, putting on what they knew would be their last war dance on their native lands.

Caton continues:

If you put the head flush against the wall, there’s a trianglish void between the side of the bed and the other wall, a hole perfect for socks, sheets, limbs and boyfriends to tumble into mid-slumber.

But if you put the side of the bed against its wall, the triangle moves to the headspace, and that’s just weird.

Although the bed situation isn’t as weird as the dresser.

“Look at this. I mean, look at this!” she said, turning our attention to the opposite wall with a wild wave of her hands.

On the far side of the room, there was another wall 90 degrees to nothing, but this one had a decorative cement curve about an inch from the real wall. Wonderfully futuristic in a ’60s way, this large floor-to-ceiling swoosh hid jarring angles whilst compelling images of a Star Trek brig, but created an inch-wide gap between the curvy fake “Look at me, I’m architect Bertrand Goldberg” pseudowall and the actual wall that holds up the ceiling and such.

Plus, what with pi and all, Jules and Tim’s very rectangular dresser can’t go in the corner. The only thing the functionless curve does is push the dresser into the middle of what would otherwise be an open space of wall, with one awkward corner tapping the cement curve that hides an undustable inch gap.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Julie asked us.

“Us,” in this case, was a group of her friends there for a party. Drinks, chitchat, smokes on a balcony giving a tearjerkingly beautiful vista of river, lake and lights, then — although I skipped this part — bowling at the alley downstairs. It was everything Bertrand Goldberg dreamed of when he designed Marina City.

Jules and Tim love living in the twin corncob towers along the river. They love the view, they love the conveniences, they love the ability to drop by home between rides as captains on the tour boats to have lunch in their own kitchens.

They don’t love the fact the apartments were designed without 90 degree angles. Goldberg believed that since there are no right angles in nature, there should be none in architecture, proving conclusively that the man had never heard of pyrite, halite, feldspar, the centrioles in our cells or certain types of table salt.

Or had ever heard of the proper placement of dressers.

Marina City is a sweeping, gorgeous affair I truly love. Its background is one of compromise, the most high-minded of architects plotting with the most clout-laden and corrupt of developers, unified forever by a shared run from Nazis. But I’ve written that story before.

Instead today’s tale is one of breathtaking views, modern conveniences, accessible twin rooftops that will make urban planners feel religion and a young, happy couple occasionally falling between the bed and the wall when they try to sleep.

For more on Marina City, watch its construction

For more on architecture, read about a trend I distrust

For something different, read about a lonely, horrible Australian

When I was exploring Le Puy-en-Velay, you went 9.3 miles into the LGBTQ community.

While I was in Marseilles, you took your bike down our endangered lakefront.

My wife and I are following the Tour de France. You’re taking the Tour de Chicago. And for your last stage, a one-mile jaunt down LaSalle Street.

This one’s going to get weird.

Since I don’t want to miss a moment of this, I loaded up the site before we left with Le Tour de Chicago, four bike routes through famous sites in the city’s history. I’m not posting these as thought exercises — get out there and explore this city.

We rode through Chicago’s newspaper history on Friday, and later this week will learn about lakefront encroachment and something I’m just calling “A Warhellride to the Goddess.”

Today’s bike tour is going to go through some of the spots connected to Chicago’s gay and lesbian community

See other LGBTQ landmarks not on this bike route

We live in sunsets now, and warm nights of sushi and wine on patios. We live in texts from friends letting us know of impromptu get-togethers after.

That’s it, right? Life’s like this forever now?

It’s not summer in Chicago. The calendar says spring, so spring it must be. But a hot flash in the air has baked the world, turned it golden. Sun shines, the birds sing and the street musician on Grand and State brought out the electric keyboard because he’s pretty sure it’s not going to get rained on.

Shorts are out, and T-shirts. We have to re-learn to look for whooshing bikes when we cross a street, re-teach ourselves to keep eyes above the necklines.

And nights taste like drips of sweet wine, luring us to wander neon streets for ever and ever and always.

For always.

It’s a story I’ve written before along this endless, deathless cycle of spring, summer, fall, the darkening time. It’s a story I’ll feel each day I realize I want the world to live like this forever.

I want the world to be warmth, fresh food and nights with friends. I want the world to be bike rides and T-shirts.

In a few months, when I tire of sunburn prickles and sweat in uncomfortable places, I’ll want fall again. And then I’ll want snowballs and radio carols.

But for now, all I want is warm nights on patios. All I want is for this to be the way we live now.

In praise of fall

A scene of winter

Bikes and the scent of chocolate