Where are the windswept plains?

Starschmuck mornings which give me time to read ECPR conference papers, slurp a grande non-fat latte and listen to XM satellite radio customized for the creative class. Of course, this could have been anywhere: Ann Arbor, Kowloon or Cambridge.

But now it is Texas, and the light rain outside the window surprises me. It is so green, so welcoming and the people sitting around me seem to work just as relentlessly as everywhere else in America. Our apartment is not so far from the railroad and, at night, the cargo trains blast their dreamlike horns as they make their way through Arlington. I am eager to explore, to sink into that special vacation-like mood in which you develop a sensibility for the small details. As the Welsh poet William Henry Davies once put it:

“What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. ... No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night.”