Every phone ping preceding another in-wash of images from S’s travels — and I think, why, yellow has become the palette I associate with Ohio: the sunshine jollity on Kelleys Island of a colony of rare Lakeside daisies (‘found only in four fairly remote places in the world’); the more sombre ripe-grain hues of unknown aquatic flowers, bow-bent in an ox-bow lake; the amber cast of sun on swamp cypresses along the river bank (‘where the Great Miami River meets the Ohio’); a rusting boat hull in the Black River in Lorain — bronze and orange upon chiffon; reflected city lights on the Buffalo River, red-gold messages scrawled in a flame alphabet, neon pyrography upon the night water.

re: Kelleys Island —  for an equatorial girl my glacier vocabulary is now up to four: chatter marks, glacial erratics (both from reading Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh,) drumlins, glacial grooves.