A Neighborhood of Seasons

 Birds in Flight is a striking piece of art found along the Sycamore Greenway. Less than half a mile to the north can be found another public art piece: a pair of mosaic obelisks marking the entrance to the trail near Grant Wood Elementary.

Designed and created by students from City High, and installed in 2014, the mosaics (titled Grant Wood: A Neighborhood of Seasons) were assembled with contributions from around 75 students over the course of two years. Each obelisk depicts a year of activities , faced with winter, spring, summer, and fall scenes featuring trees and trails. 

With charming detail, the scenes include bicycling and dog-walking, football and snowball fights. The flora changes through each panel, and different weather and times of day can be discerned. The colorful glass tesserae, simple colors and shapes individually, come together to create a complex and cohesive whole in the same way that each plant, each animal, each person in a community comes together to tell a story more complete than any individual can create.

• Read about the installation of the mosaics from the Press Citizen.
• Review the city's Public Art Strategic Plan.
  

A Not-So-Solitary Walk

With a fluffy, moist snow falling, a morning jaunt on the Greenway trail offers evidence of other like-minded gallivanters. The wintry covering deadens sound...but provides a fleeting history of who has passed the same way moments earlier.

First, the distinctive pattern of a rabbit, with paired hind feet bounding ahead of the single-file forefeet.

Next, a large striding bird that I can only assume to be a pheasant crossing the trail. The slender toes so different from our own, just bones with a thin covering of flesh and scales. 

A squirrel, chunky and dark against the snow, bounds quickly into the tree cover, but not without leaving its bunched prints in the slush.

Our only wild hoofed animal in Iowa makes a virtual appearance with a series of prints where a small group of deer crossed the trail. Like the pheasant, a print so different from the fleshy-padded feet of so many other mammals.

And finally, a human and its canine companion, out for a morning run in less-than-ideal weather conditions. The only set of tracks that follows the trail rather than cutting across it!

  Minuscule tracks of rodents, frenetic scratches of sparrows, the easy line of a cat sidling along. The winter reminds us that we are not alone outside, even if we never see another living thing on our journey.