Showing posts with label parks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parks. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

A walk in the park

No, I haven't a clue what the deal is
with the silk flowers under this tree.
Today was a bit nippy, and it was a lot windy, too, but it was a fine day for a walk in the park.

Especially considering that Thursday will not be so good a day to walk anywhere; there's a winter storm on the way Wednesday night.

Omaha's Elmwood Park is about a two-mile jaunt from our house, not too far a destination in an ongoing take-off-the-weight walking regimen. It was established in 1890, and it's simply one of the most beautiful spots in town -- and there are a lot of lovely nooks, crannies and wide expanses in this spread-out river city of almost 425,000 people.

This brisk almost-Christmas day, Elmwood -- a huge park just to the east of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and encompassing walking trails, a swimming pool, picnic and fitness areas and an 18-hole golf course -- was a winter wonderland.


I HAD been wanting to take pictures on one of my walks through Elmwood for some time now, and I'm so glad today was the day I chose to do it. The dusting of snow still on the ground from the weekend added such a picture-postcard quality to the landscape.

What is a tranquil and gorgeous spot right in the middle of Omaha's urban sprawl -- and the rewards in paradise must be bounteous for the old cow town's urban planners who created its park system more than 120 years ago -- was just stunning today, draped in a blanket of white.

So I just had to share this Omaha gem with the rest of the world here. It's what I do.

And it's my pleasure as well.


GOD, I love this town. Really, I do.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Nebraska, explained


















Sometimes, words are wholly insufficient in explaining a place and a people.

Sometimes, only art will do.


Consider this sculpture garden in downtown Omaha -- Pioneer Courage, it is called -- as good an explanation of this city, of this state, as any you will find in history texts.

When the white man fanned out across the Plains, as Willa Cather wrote in My Antonia, “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

In 1854, the year Omaha was incorporated, there weren't even trees to be found on this vast prairie. The pioneers . . . the homesteaders planted them all.


I love this park. It's where the pioneers silently and eternally press on through our past -- and headlong into the future they bequeathed us.