Raining in this misty kinda way yesterday, and had to go downtown to pick up a new router from my ISP, hence the photographs I posted yesterday. You know, one stone two birds or whatever that phrase is.

The streets were almost deserted, which made my photographic mission a bit more difficult, hard to take portraits, you know, with no subjects, but I prevailed. Ran across the odd character standing in a doorway or alcove, out of the rain where possible, puffing on a smoke. I’d nod in acknowledgement of kinship with their cold & wet isolation, for that cylinder of sin, and left them to it.

My rotten router has been on the fritz since the water main on my street went a couple of weeks before. After a visit by some tech guys, and it had worked randomly, like a sail in the wind, one minute there the next absent.

I lost whole words, sentences and time to that random connection over the days since, typing away not realizing its gone.

I’m on a Chromebook so everything I do is online, well, like most of us I suppose, my entertainment is an unlimited connection away, usually. Many moments wasted swearing at that inanimate contraption, at its wanton connection, here and gone without my awareness, talking to the walls was I, cussing out the spirits that be, and stomping back and forth between my chair and my router, chair and my router, waiting for that oh so very desired fourth green light that would sometimes, only sometimes, mean the whorish Internets return.

So, bing bang, router swapped, and I was off to exploring down at the river, at Harris Park.

And the rain begins to come down harder, but I make my way like I’m being drawn, and this merely a necessary cleansing.

Luckily I’m no fool and traipsed down to Tuckey’s Hardware before I started off on my quest and picked up an Umbrella. As I was itching to feel the springish air on my face, sniff for the scent of it on the wind, in the debris left from the giant mounds of melting snow that had no were to go and so crashed and bashed its way down our Thames River, all through town, smashing into bridges and swamping basements, crashing through fences like they were matchsticks, and bending metal signposts for a parlor trick, and nothing was getting in my way.

Take a look.

Now, lately I think having a broken internet is a blessing in disguise, as I find my faith waning of late after a perusal of the daily news.

And than, I think yesterday, a bridge goes and collapses in this sleepy little port town on Lake Erie, just south of here, sending a dump truck into the river as the section just snaps like a twig under its weight.

“It snapped behind me and I slid back down,” he said. “I heard a loud crash.

“The next thing I know, I’m in the water.”

The tail end of Barber’s dump truck ended up submerged in the fast-flowing water, while the cab was wedged at a 45-degree angle on a broken section of the bridge.
~ London Free Press, Friday, February 23, 2018

Which is what I had read of earlier. But then I learned one little tidbit, as the school had let out not long before, and school buses would have soon been going over that self-same bridge.

Thankfully, the dump truck driver was not hurt, and there he is standing by the side of that mighty Thames, with a big grin on his face relaying his incredible tale to our local media.

Sometimes the world makes my heart smile, some days it makes it cry, and I ask “is anybody out there?

It really is these little miracles that spark my faith in it all. My belief that good will win, and evil will fail, ultimately. I’m always on the lookout for those moments of divine coincidence, recognizing miracles afoot.

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation