One of the things I love most about Prague is that once you are out of the center a little bit, there are lots of little places where you wander off the beaten path and suddenly you are surrounded by trees. It might be a park, there are a lot of beautiful parks in this city. But not necessarily.
The place where Isabel takes her tennis lessons is an interesting place. (btw, she mentioned to me today that she is not crazy about tennis. Maybe it was just a bad day, maybe it was just to deflect criticism because the coach said she was just running around and not listening, but we’ve paid good money for these lessons so, by golly, she’s going to finish out the year.) We’ve lived in this neighborhood over 10 years now and I didn’t even know it was there. A little wooded parkland, behind concrete and barbed wire, with a security gate like you’d think they had something valuable in there, tucked in off to the side of the road that crosses the railroad tracks.
We’ve started going a different way lately. Instead of around the hotel and up the hill the way the traffic goes, we take some steps off to the side, through the graffiti splattered tunnel under the rairoad tracks, and it’s wild and natural, but it’s not even close to being a park. It’s just sort of a no-mans land, littered with garbage and the housekeeping items of the homeless. We’d never come back that way, it’s dark then.
It was a beautiful autumn day today, the leaves are multicolored but many are lying in soggy clumps here and there up the stairs and there was a dying rose garden with 3 or 4 blazingly brilliant rogue survivors.
Nature is beautiful, even if it’s not in the place we’ve assigned to it. Maybe especially when it’s not in the place we assigned to it.
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