nothing to speak of

The view itself was nothing to speak of — dumpsters, power lines, the occasional good dog sighting — but the light was generous, forgiving, the kind that makes even a chipped coffee mug glow like stained glass.

"I had no pain, nothing to speak of, and then 'bam, I had a mouth cancer diagnosis'," he says.

The sight of actual human bodies gathered way up there only drew more attention to the otherwise uniform emptiness of the apartment façades — no laundry over the banisters, no plants, no weird window treatments, no tiny sparkle of television sets filtering through curtains, nothing to speak of whatever lives are bustling about next to the giant Nordstrom with the big ground-floor bathroom where I empty my DivaCup after fingering the 30%-off titles at Barnes & Noble.

“Horror. There’s nothing to speak of, especially in the center,” 76-year-old Lyubov Chudnyk said of Lyman, the town she has lived in for 42 years.

“Now, our generation, what have we done? What do we have? We have nothing to speak of,” he said.