Eugene Richards The Blue Room

Eugene Richards' book The Blue Room, photos of and in abandoned houses in New Mexico and Nebraska and Wyoming and North Dakota, has thrown me into a downspiral. A beautiful and melancholy downspiral.

After "reading" the book of photos, one beautiful image of death and loss and decay after the other, after the bonechill induced by the house cornered by barbed wire gone slack followed by the photo of a double bed drifted with snow through the broken window, after gasping at the prosthetic leg abandoned but still wearing its white shoe, I'm more certain than ever that the thing of which I'm most certain is absolute. Ordered systems tend to disorder. Without fail.

The photo I've found in a National Geographic article by Richards and Charles Bowden again lays the ordered systems of industrious human beings -- plowed field, barbwire fence, graded road, framed house -- against a cold and merciless nature.

Entropy is the law in North Dakota. And in the house of my brittling bones and sagging flesh.

A rainy spring morning, mountains partially veiled.

I slip into a thoughtful mood, think/see the silver green of the sage, the new green of the oakbrush, the darker green of the maples, and the blackgreen of the still snowy mountains.

We'll work the flagstone puzzle on the strip of sand, walk with our dog, and perhaps drive to Salt Lake to visit our friend Mark in the hospital. Bad breaks, again.

He deals with what he's given, works to regain what he's lost, fights entropy. Ultimately, because that second law of thermodynamics is, in fact, the law, we'll all succumb. 

But not this morning.