Lady Bird Johnson :: photo by Frank Wolfe
Look at that face! Don't you just love that little smirk of disgust? One look at her and you know she's suffering fools as kindly as she can. This is the look I get on my face when people ask me why on earth I moved back to Texas. My friends & family don't understand the soft spot in my heart for Texas. Probably because they've spent their lives in areas considered beautiful. The lush rolling hills of the Mid-Atlantic. The rugged outdoors and amazing weather of Northern California. The Eastern Shore. The West Coast. It's easy to call those places beautiful. What my peeps don't understand is that to really see beauty, you have to first experience extreme ugliness. The monotonous concrete blond winters of the levelands. The searing pain of black leather seats on the back of your bare thighs in August. This is the stuff that really helps you appreciate the simplist of beauties - like wildflowers...and air conditioning.
We just got back from a Texas road trip. We drove from Dallas to Galveston to spend a long weekend at perhaps the most unappealing beach I've ever seen. The water's brown and muddy, the sand's sticky like clay, and the wind never stops blowing. But the drive was incredible - thanks to Lady Bird Johnson and her wildflower efforts. Ten total hours on roads as flat as a table top...with nothing to look at but this as far as the eye can see.
