Monday Visual Inspiration: Tended and un[in]tended

For your Memorial Day enjoyment, a few photos from the weekend's stroll.

Evidently, now is the season for irises in Denver. And since the pot with irises in it on my balcony is devoid of anything green, I think it's safe to say that my irises didn't survive the winter. However, it's nice to see them thriving here, just two or so weeks after we had late-May snow.

There's something lovely about English-garden wildness in the Mile High. Roses and irises take over this yard in a calculated way, as if they'd pop up even if the people in the house suddenly disappeared.

The property in front of this restaurant looked a bit forgotten then it opened, as if they'd forgotten to landscape properly. Turns out they were waiting to build a really nice patio and ADA entry ramp.

O hai! Mama went into the coffee shop for some noms, brb. Funny, the dog's leash and collar tell you that someone will be back to get him shortly, but I felt like I should stand next to this furry cutie until someone returned for him.

Another victim of the economy, a retail tenant space in Cherry Creek North stands empty. The non-native pampas grass stands watered and nurtured by the glossy insulated glazing and storefront windows, and a passerby pauses to remember what used to occupy the now-empty space.

A victim of progress: the back side of the early-Modernist Post Office with its shade screens over the west-facing windows. The Post Office has no relocated into a new retail/office building next door to the south. (And I have a bone to pick with that new building's door hardware, but that's another post.)

The old Post Office's loading dock as well as a better view of the shade screens. The loading dock is a silent oasis in a busy retail and entertainment area, as if the most important activities are buying and selling and amusing, not sitting down to write a letter or sending an important package to another human being. You are not modern, Post Office, just Modern. You were built during a time when we thought we would have flying cars and self-cleaning houses. The world would be clean and perfect and communism would perish and we would only work two hours a day because computers would do all of our work. Now we give back our vacation time to keep working, terrorism haunts us like the shadow that communism wishes it cold have been, and we have computers meant for instant communication but nothing to say.