Mulberry Picker

Posted by jdg | 10:26 AM | ,


I came across this guy picking mulberries on a highway service drive yesterday.  He had that tree nearly picked clean and I told him about some of my favorite places to pick. Then I asked him what he was going to do with all his mulberries, and he said, "Man, I'm just gonna EAT 'em!"


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We watched the pheasant go in and out of view among the tall grasses in front of the ruined building my daughter calls The Castle, and an old guy came out on his porch we talked about the birds a bit.

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If you're ever in Detroit's neighborhoods in June, you have a chance to see that some of those plants growing up and taking over the porches of abandoned homes are actually the former owner's untamed rose bushes.

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Mormon Missionaries, Michigan Ave.

Posted by jdg | 11:47 AM | ,


The father of one of my good friends in high school did his Mormon mission in Italy. I believe it was somewhere in Tuscany, maybe even Florence. I ate my first real Italian meal at their house. The time he spent in Italy inspired him to live a life bent towards classical learning, and later he would be my professor in Latin and Ancient Greek in college.

Whenever I see smiling young Mormon boys in their tidy yet oafish uniforms out on the mean streets of Detroit, I wonder about the guy in Provo who gave these poor saps their assignment. They could have been eating wild boar in Umbria and learning to speak Italian to their unkissed beloveds back at BYU. Instead they are clutching their blankets at night in Detroit feeling lucky just to get off that one porch alive. That Mormon God has a sick sense of humor.


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The Artist at Work

Posted by jdg | 1:02 PM | , ,


Saw this guy painting a mural on his garage, and came back a few days later to see the results. Love the panther.


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Goat, Boy

Posted by jdg | 1:59 PM | , ,


We've been over in the neighborhood where the incredible Barbie-collecting dog-grooming goat herders live every day for the past few weeks, and almost every afternoon there's a group of people out by the fence gawking and feeding the goats. We always stop too and it's a lot of fun.

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