Violet Flowers, August Nights, and Portals

Two nights ago, we were sitting out on the porch having dinner, after a brief but much needed break from the humid summer days that we've been experiencing all too often lately. I had left my phone upstairs, intentionally, so I wouldn't be tempted to grab it to look things up we were talking about, or look to my side to see it light up for one of the few notifications that still slips through (I've been trying to turn off all of them, in an attempt at using digital minimalism to regain some semblance of control over my attention span and life). Our neighbor was across the street, sitting on the porch with her cat, Chicken, and we watched as passersby would all stop to say hi to him. He likes to sit (on a leash) at the bottom of the stairs, or on the garden wall by the sidewalk, and just watch people as they walk by. Chicken is a fixture of the neighborhood. After dinner, my dad was talking about a certain painting, a Van Gogh, in which the artist originally titled Violet Flowers. In…