Yellow lilies in a vase on the coffee table—makes me want to find a brush and paint! Haven’t felt that impulse in many years. In color-drenched Miami painting seems redundant, like pouring gasoline on a fire. View out the back toward the brick garage, the industrial green alleyway of trash bins, the black tarred roof, gray angles of houses through a screen of bare trees, red brick chimney, a new brass roof coping—that’s the whole palette: grays, whites and off-whites, glossy black, matte black, muted brick and muddy ochre, not true red but earthy and organic reds. And there is metal—iron and bright aluminum—and black cables and phone lines, and gray electric cables, and brown utility poles. A grab-bag vernacular of garages, porches, carriage houses, stoops and porticoes. The backs of homes are more revealing than their faces, informal and unscripted, like people on vacation, like reality TV, and the city’s alleys compose an urban commons that is actually quite lovely on our block, backyards like a valley between the low cliffs of apartment buildings, the alley a babbling brook upon the valley floor, all the catkins busting out of the bare branches, the forsythia not yet bloomed but already yellow, yellow like a clarion, like an Augustinian text. Color matters in Chicago, every shade and half-tone, silvery gray scale of the rain-wet trees, voluptuous green of tulip shoots, a world of color reassembling, reconfiguring its photons and pixels. Incipience! Clay at the river’s edge as the gods emerge from the water, the winged lion poised above the gates of the city at dawn.