This week’s challenge: ‘The City‘.

Houston on a beautiful winter day in February of this year.

Taken while attending a National Geographic Photography Session at the U of H Downtown Campus.

This week’s challenge: ‘The City‘.

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I have this site set up with Amazon linking “smartly” to the content. Oft-times I have a real problem figuring out the links relevance to the words or phrase the link is attached to. On Tuesday that wasn’t a problem. I had made a comment on the Brazos River. Amazon linked to John Graves’ Goodbye to a River: A Narrative. That book is one of my favorites and led me to acquiring many of Mr. Graves’s later works.

“Goodbye to a River” is one of the best pure Texas books I have ever read. The mixture of nature, history, and personal narrative leaves me longing to learn to string words together in a like manner.

I have spent very little time around the Brazos of John Graves’s stories. The Brazos in my life is the river in it’s dotage just before it dies in the Gulf of Mexico. Broad, slow moving, full of color washed down from the far reaches. Not the river that once flowed free and are chronicled for the last time in Mr. Graves’s book.

There is a form of writing that has come to be known as “writing of place”, Mr. Graves has the distinction of being one of those writers who can put the place wholly into the stories he spins. And the place he loves and writes about are the hard scrabble places of west Texas. Dry, dusty, thin soiled places. Places a person has to work at just staying afloat. Places where living hasn’t had the life wrung out of it.

If you haven’t heard of John Graves before, do yourself a favor…Go float down a river about to be tamed with a man who knows the story of every little named bend and stream. It’ll be time well spent…

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Time to hit the road…catch you on the other side…