This is a photograph of a plum. It was the final exposure of summer, 2009. I include it here because it was also the final exposure of 2009. I captured the image on a great day, possibly the best day of the year; a day spent driving and hiking through fields and forests of Wisconsin, enjoying our home turf through the eyes of visitors.
Visitors make visible, things faded to invisible because we take them for granted.
And because they cause us to go where wild plums and other more rare things are, in the few days that they are, visitors make to us gifts of what surrounds us season to season to season.
The photo pleases me, not because it is a great photograph but because of the color; the red plum floating smug and self-satisfied among ragged, moth-eaten aging green leaves; heavy, mature, late season foliage and freckled, ripe fruit marking completion of yet another cycle.
We live on a glorious planet.
© 2010 Karl e May
Days grow short so quickly. When I wake, the eastern sky offers no promise of day. It seems the birds do not sing until 5 AM. Summer passes quickly and with its passing I feel a general uneasiness.
I continue to waddle quickly, which is as close to running as I can get. Consider wearing a 90 lb. pack and taking a half-hour jog in the park, you’ll get the idea. It feels bad but it is starting to feel good. I look forward to more of the later.
I finally bit the bullet and purchased iWork and iLife for my Macintosh. Someone needs to explain iPhoto to me. I’ve used Google Picasa for a few years and have that model in my head, which may be the problem, but iPhoto just does not seem great for keeping photos organized.
Cool night. Good for sleeping.
Happy birthday Lizzy.
© 2009 Karl May
I went for a short run last night. It felt more like a botched suicide attempt than exercise. In other words “Where are my endorphins?” After, I stretched, like a good boy, then pulled a Rocky Raccoon and took a nap in the corner. By time I woke up, it was bed-time.
Sometimes sleep is good.
Since the photo was taken, sunlight has started to bleach the purple from the chives; balloon flowers now rule as the purple in the garden. The season rushes by like an express trying to catch up on lost time. So much to do. So much to do.
© 2009 Karl May
The hairy pods eventually open to large orange blossoms with paper-like petals. This photo has all phases: two unopened pods below the maple leaves, a full blossom, an emerging blossom and the final, seed pod stage on the stem above the full blossom. All phases unravel from mid-May to mid-June.
Summer arrived. Days are getting as long as days get here. Aggressive grasses grow faster than we can mow and pollen drifts everywhere. This weekend the farmer’s markets should open, which leads to more busy-ness. Life is good.
© 2009 Karl May
Poppies before they bloom fascinate me. Like a hairy egg on a stick, they sway in the wind slowly. It seems the stems should break under the weight. Poppy leaves are pretty too but once the twisty stems and furry pods arrive, the eye has no time for the leaves.
The chill of spring continued well into June this year and the garden varieties got a late start. Other plants, like the poppies and rhubarb, thrived in the cool.
All but one of the poppy buds are bloomed and gone now. The cycle is quick; we get to enjoy the flowers for a week, they fade in the sun and fall from the stem.
Summer moves on. At 4AM, as I write this, a small bird outside the window sings his heart out to the growing light of the morning sky.
© 2009 Karl May
Summer plows toward us and time comes to enjoy for one final week the blooms of spring. In seven days or less, the pink will disappear, replaced by yellow and purple summer flowers.
Spring/early Summer blows cool and dry for now; warm enough for the garden but comfortable for walking and talking. We expect hot, humid weather within the week; good for garden growth but I think I prefer this extended cool.
© 2009 Chrome Poet
People abandon things. Archeologists discover the abandoned things, connect the dots and write history. Of neat cultures, cultures who use what they have forever, who do not abandon things, we know nothing. Perhaps such a culture cannot exist.
We abandon what we abandon for many reasons. Sometimes life passes by and the thing we desired, the object that had value, loses desire and value. A crude concrete tank made to keep milk cool between evening milking and the early morning arrival of the milk truck. Concrete walls poured thick to keep in the cold surround an opening in which two milk-cans fit. Cold water surrounded the cans, kept the milk cool in summer and warm enough not to freeze in winter. When mass production cheese companies destroyed the markets of local cheese factories, the local factories closed. Big cheese had no use for a small production, 2 cans-a-day farms. The concrete tank lost it’s value in a market change. It was hitched to a tractor, pulled to a hidden corner and abandoned.
Without a market for milk, the cows had negative value. They were sold and the steel tank used to water them joined the milk tank, abandoned among the weeds. An artifact, if left as is, for future archeologists to discover. Two tanks. Reminders of the tank people. Out of the tank-age. When humans learned to make tanks.
People abandon things. It’s what we do.
© 2009 Karl May
Since Christmas:
It was too cold for photos.
Then I was really busy.
Then I was really tired.
Then I started playing an online game.
And now I’ve lent out my camera.
I’ll get back to this soon.
Really.
A quick note; then I need to shovel snow again.
The empty boat dock rests among dormant cattails. Or so it seems to me. To others, it probably looks abandoned. This, in a way, explains the difference between people who like winter and those who do not.
At the edge of Winter evenings, silence lies so intense it roars. Even with tinnitus singing in my ears I realize the huge absence of sound; the sound of resting Earth.
Spring waits around the corner. Summer rushes toward us and we’ve been talking about our garden and tasks we need to complete after the snow melts; but for now, time to rest.
This is not a great photo, I struggle to grok night photography. I post it because I unintentionally caught two people walking to an ice-fishing shanty under a full moon. I did not see them in the view finder when I took the shot but they are there, directly under the moon. If you cannot pick them out, click the photo, you should link to a larger version.
I arrived at the harbor at sunset hoping to get a shot of the moon rising but a bank of clouds obscured the horizon. I waited. Temperatures dropped to single digits. Finally, the moon inched beyond the clouds. I mention time and temperature because the fishermen are walking to, not from, the shanty. They are not calling it a day and heading home.
So it goes with the ice-fishing folks, mostly men and boys; a dedicated group who ignore the challenges of winter as long as the fish are biting.
