Detail Diary, Vol #19

A vivid vacation at home

July 23 - Aug 14, 2024

Dear friend,

I’ve spent the last few weeks bouncing around Utah and southeast Idaho, seeing my youngest sister wed and visiting many friends and family (and dog). In the meantime, I was deeply enriched by color and flavor. There are garden patches and other sources of color in Grenoble, but early August in American suburbia and its fringes turned out to be a previously untapped mother lode for my Detail Diary.

There was my mom’s flower-vegetable garden in mid-harvest, our abundant raspberry bushes, a visit to Yellowstone (a color theme park in its own right), a watercolor session, luxuriant sunsets atoning for the pall of wildfire smoke or reveling in the purification of passing storms, and even the personality-rich odds and ends of antiques and hobbies in my parents and grandparents’ houses that are far from lying around in my Grenoble apartment. The wedding, too, was a palette-based affair, and a lovely one.

All of it makes me resolve to foray farther off the beaten path in search of color, back in Grenoble. (But before then, we will have two weeks in the Swiss Alps to mine!)

Enjoy—and keep going for bonus pup footage at the end ;)

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Results of my Grand Prismatic watercolor experiment:

Bonus: my family’s dog, Cusco, the main reason for visiting Idaho ;)