Cold but sunny. Long afternoon walk in Golden Gate Park with a friend, out past the riding stables. The park is big enough and my sense of space hazy enough that I am reliably surprised over and over by familiar meadows and lakes and other landscape features that suddenly appear where I never expected to see them. This rhododendron was a solitary, with none of its siblings in sight. I know there is a whole Rhododendron Dell someplace but I haven't seen it for ages, and can't of course be bothered to look at a map.
