Austin in Late July — cat watson

Monday, August 22, 2022

In late July I got on a plane and flew to Austin, landing on a Friday evening to a city pulsing with heat and a palpable energy in anticipation of the weekend . This was a trip originally bound for San Francisco back in May of 2020, but, well, Covid.

Fast forward to 2022 and my brother and his wife had moved to Texas and added the 19th grandchild to the mix. I arrived 6 weeks after she was born.

We ate well—pizza on the grill, homemade blackberry scones, breakfast burritos with fresh bacon from the farmer’s market, creamed corn, kale corn slaw. My nephew and I played with cars and trains and I drew some truly terrible pictures for him. Sydney squirmed and cooed and yawned expertly. She woke up to be held just as we sat down to eat, as newborns do (and multiple times throughout the night I’m told, though I wasn’t privy.)

Austin is a place that feels alive and humming—the sky, the bugs, the murals, the food, the food trucks. It is draped in bold, bright colors. The light is somehow both soft and strong, beautiful yet unrelenting in her persistence to exist.