And a happy Valentine’s day to you!
Tonight was incredibly windy…I mean major gusts of wind that were quite scary.
So naturally I got my camera and headed outside! It was a cloudy night and the wind was furiously pushing the clouds around, so I thought it would be interesting to set my camera on a tripod and take some long exposure shots to see what the clouds looked like in slow motion.
Here is the result…
Ah…Friday the 13th!
Today I’m playing with color. The orange photo is actually a mistake. I don’t know what I did or what it was supposed to be, but I liked it. The other two photos are of sunrise, one from Tony’s window and one from the road.
Hair today, gone tomorrow… I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my hair my whole life. It’s strange, my hair. I was born with black hair that turned red. The red turned blonde. The blonde turned brown. The brown turned red again. The red turned dark auburn. The auburn stayed until I had kids and then the black came back. That’s all without coloring it! I was most comfortable as a red-head, so that’s what I went back to. The color isn’t the annoying part of it, though. I haven’t been able to form my true “hair identity” yet. It’s difficult to deal with. It’s very thin, but it also doesn’t lay well, due to several cow licks that keep it a bit wacky. I loved it way back in the 80s when it was long and permed, but since then I’ve liked it and hated it and liked it and hated it more times than I can count. I’ve grown it out, I’ve cut it off. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I’ve actually been enjoying my long hair lately. I can hide behind my long hair. I can change it around. I can twirl it between my fingers or pull on it if I am nervous. I think I look younger with long hair. In the past two years, I have become very satisfied with my long hair and have been comfortable keeping it that way for a while. Then a close friend of mine shared that her cancer had come back. She had been battling it for 3 years, it had gone away, and now it was back with a vengeance. One of the first things that she said about it was, “Now I’m going to lose my hair again…” This was tough for her, as it had just grown back and she was so glad to have it again. I started thinking about my hair and how I take it for granted. Sure, I don’t always like it, but at least I have the free will to do with it as I please. My friend and thousands of other women don’t have that choice. I decided to donate it to locksoflove.org I was originally going to shave it all off in support of my friend; though that would have been a nice gesture of support, it wouldn’t have helped anyone. So I took this route instead and went to a stylist who was familiar with the organization and how to cut my hair to save as much of it as possible to send off. Rastafarians believe that bodily, mental, and spiritual energy is held in the hair through dreadlocks. Sometimes negative energy can be trapped in your hair and thus the need to cut your hair off at certain points in your life. I’m trying to let go of a lot of negative energy right now, so I am seeing the loss of my locks as a symbol of letting go and beginning again. So here’s to healing and new beginnings.
I took my photography class out again today, this time to photograph a nearby church.
The church is from the late 1800s and I love the windows.
The sky features a lot in my images these days.
I’m fascinated by it, really. The beautiful clouds, the color of the sky, sunrise, sunset…I seem to be looking to the sky more often for inspiration.
The first is mid-afternoon, and the second is sunset, including a reflection in the window and church in the background. Because I exposed the image for the reflection, it doesn’t really do the vivid colors of the sunset justice. It was a dark, overpowering orange…
Two incredibly different subjects today…
A cabbage, and the lights over Tony’s record collection.
It was unseasonably warm and beautiful today…
…so Tony and I went for a walk around the block. We stopped off at “our bench,” a place that for years we’ve liked to sit and talk, even though it is at a relatively busy intersection. It doesn’t matter: the conversation is great.
So cheers to a beautiful day with a wonderful companion!
By far the greatest find at my mother’s house this weekend was old family photos that I have never seen before.
In fact, I found three photos of my grandparents that my mother had never even seen, and she was thrilled to have them. I also found my mother’s college yearbooks tucked away in a moldy closet. She thought they had long been thrown out.
My grandmother Murielle (aka “Mama Benton”) was my first grandparent to die, passing when I was only 10 years old. I don’t have as many memories of her as I would like. I remember her as quiet and polite and always cooking something. I can still see her sitting by the stove on her stool, wiping the sweat from her forehead and stirring a pot of something that smelled delicious. She was kind and gracious. Her mother and father built the house that my mother grew up in. Murielle’s father was from England and was a military man, tall and stern. Her mother was from Virginia and looked a lot like my grandmother.
My grandfather Clint (aka “Pa”) was kind and jovial. He died on the day of my senior prom and my brother Joe’s birthday, when I was 18 years old. I remember his laugh, his funny stories of yore, and how hard he worked in his garden. He loved his dogs and raised quail. He seemed to always be working in the garden or sitting on the porch swing. He also used to love eating saltine crackers crumbled up in milk.
He was bald for most of his adult life and surely when I knew him, so to find a photo of him with hair was quite exciting for me. I didn’t even recognize him!
So here you have it…special memories that were tucked away for years. I’m so glad I found them.
I went home to see my mother today to meet with a realtor and sort through some things.
The meeting went well and we have some things in motion now that we’ve needed to do for years. I’m positive that things are starting to move forward, but it’s still a very big hill to climb…
As I was doing some laundry, I looked up on the shelves at the Tom Clark gnomes that she used to collect. I remember how much she and my dad loved to collect them. They probably have over 100 of them and now, they just sit and collect dust.
What becomes of the things that are most important to us, the things that we love and collect over the course of our lives? I once attended an estate auction where there were probably over 500 of these gnomes. The woman who had collected them had died, and now her whole life of collecting was being sold in lots for dirt cheap. Something she probably paid $100 for was now sold in a box of 5 items for $10.
I’m learning the hard way that things are just that: things. All of the trinkets that are important to us, all of the little things we collect, are meaningful only if we give them meaning. Otherwise, they are just materials molded into something and sold. My mother and her two sisters who live with her have thousands of trinkets. My brothers and I are trying to sort through them to see what is important and what we can sell. It’s no easy task.
Things are just things, yes. It’s the memories that are important. The love, the time shared together, the warmth of family and home: these are the things that matter and will carry on.
I posted this earlier, but somehow it disappeared, so…
Here it goes again. The missing February 2nd!
A few years back, I was at an estate sale and found an old Ansco Buster Brown A2 box camera from around 1910. It’s the most simple of cameras: a box with a lens, viewfinder, and shutter release. It reminds me of a pin-hole camera. I purchased it originally because I liked the look and I love photographing with older cameras since I have access to a darkroom.
The camera sat on my shelf for two years until I pulled it out to show my younger students at school what older cameras looked like and how they functioned. When I got home later, I decided to look up how to wind the film so I could give it a try. I pulled apart the camera only to find an exposed roll of film in the camera! The film is definitely old, most likely from the 30s, 40s, or 50s, possibly even earlier. I have no idea if the film is still good or not, and, more importantly, if the roll was actually run through the camera properly, or rolled up as people tested the film winder to see if it worked.
Regardless, I’m excited about the thought that the film might just have viable images on it, images that will give a peek into times gone by.
I’m going to try to get into the darkroom soon, and will keep you posted on what I find.
Mid-Century Me 