Happy and peaceful 2024.  I’m still processing my 2023 experiences, but retrospection is a sane norm.  Besides, futurospection is too speculative.   By the way,  I’ve solved for X;  X = 3, as this post covered August through December 31 with oddball photos, in my opinion.

A 1923 cargo ship [at least part of it] gets beached for a new life as a residence along a pinewooded Upper Peninsula river bank, while 

a 1913 schoolhouse, Oak Grove School, disintegrates in an Indiana cornfield;  if this is correct, no classes have happened there since before WW2, meaning that few of its alums are still alive.

Summers these migrant geese spend in the isolated wet coastal tundra of the high Arctic, but as snow birds, they fly south to bask and feed in this field near Coney Island.

This 1950 Chevy had a translucent red hood ornament, suggesting a rocket ship ready to launch to the moon, glowing with energy…

while elsewhere in my favorite scrapyard, and saw this remarkably preserved goddess of speed on a dusty 1941 Cadillac hearse.

In a different location not far away, I got an unintended selfie while trying the capture Linda Brunker‘s 40.5’ loa and five-ton “spirit of speed.”  Inside that location behind the mirror walls are some well-preserved specimens of the same cars.

I linked to a Hudson in the paragraph directly above . . .  this tower rising from the depths of the river Hudson might look

a bit like the last sliver of a summer moon if seen shooting straight down from a drone camera.

As this daytime sea-blue moon rose, I watched hoping the vapor trail would bisect it.

Remnants of a bridge along the Cuyahoga are getting torn down by vegetation, as

this Kaiser is entrapped in same.  Henry J. Kaiser lived quite a life, as you can read here.

I have a whole post of murals I saw in 2023.  This one of a famous Marylander born not that far away is memorialized on a backstreet in Baltimore, whereas

whatever was on the second line to be remembered is lost; at least that’s my take on the photo below.

The back story here is that this music shop in this Ohio River town was for sale along with all the instruments inside because the owner and music educator is retiring.  Where has gone the music these instruments once played?  Of course they can play again.

Let’s just imagine that instead of dropping something–a ball or a host of great stand-ins— as we count down the last seconds of a calendar year . . .  instead of that, we cross a bridge of some sort.  That’s the new time period ahead, obscured in darkness and mist.  Besides, perspective is everything;  who knows what might have been going on under the bridge at that same moment.

Happiness, hoppiness,  and other good things await, I’d prefer to think, although years don’t always work out that way.  Besides, this linear construct we make of time is just a construct. The challenges of December 31 are just as challenging on January 1, and always have been.  Have a great day.  All photos, any errors, WVD.