977: Window

976: Toast to burnt sienna

975: Grass without pretense

I aspire to present as marsh grass does, without airs.

Already I’ve gone wrong: grass does not aspire nor present.

And I’ve gone triply wrong, because grass does have an air to it.

Yes, perhaps projected by me. (Is this how you’re going to play it?)

But don’t you think it means something that it exists? That it wears different clothes for the season, that it lives and dies and gives life?

Apart from my meaning, I mean.

974: Sundial

Every Saturday and Sunday I’m like a sundial–an object whose only purpose is to tell you where the sun is relative to your spot on the earth. This time of year, I’m up a couple of hours before the sun and, while I’m puttering around making coffee and checking whether people in Australia and Romania are looking at my blog, the essential thing I’m doing is keeping one eye on the eastern horizon. When it gets its first serious glow, I start putting on my warm clothes and deciding what lens I’ll trust my morning to. I want to be standing in the right place—usually near the lake a ten-minute walk from my house—when the first rays arrow through the distant tree line. As the sun gets higher and its light less interesting, I move deeper into the woods, tricking the camera into thinking it’s still new light it’s seeing.

Mabel, my dog, is always with me on these long weekend morning rambles. I let her off her leash as soon as we clear the last house on the way to the lake. She knows exactly where that is. She will stop and tremble right there until she feels the release, and then she runs flat out for a hundred yards before stopping to turn and make sure I’m still following. For the next two hours, when I don’t know where she is, she knows where I am. From time to time I stand up and look for her, then whistle once. Within fifteen seconds I see a roostertail of snow on the horizon, forming steadily into Mabel racing for me, tongue, ears, and tail in their own orbits but adding up to dog who comes when called.

A couple of weeks ago I was teasing the last of the early light out of a stand of marsh grass by lying all the way down in it. That put me out of a cold wind, too, and I gathered in me the comfort of a kid in a fort out of blankets. I could have fallen asleep, safe there under my secret sky. After a while I felt I wasn’t alone and looked shyly around me. Mabel was standing five feet away, watching me. I hadn’t whistled, but she came to see if I still existed, and seeing me prone where I should not be, she was waiting to see if she should be alarmed. I wondered what she would do if she found me unconscious. Would she wait beside me, run Lassie-like home for help, or go on back to her own rambling?

 

973: Fencepost lichens and other spots

I get so wrapped in what the background is doing that I forget it’s not the natural way to view an image. This one, though, has a focal point that is not the subject. You come to the in-focus fencepost late in the viewing, and quickly leave it. In other words, this is one that might as well be entirely out of focus—but I suppose the fencepost does give you something to anchor your perspective, if you want an anchor. Maybe it tells you what you’re looking at—the establishing shot within the shot.

972: Twiorange

971: Pine boutonierre

970: Let’s say cornflower to periwinkle (and then peach/sun yellow/cyber orange)

969: Yale/steel/maya blue into sun yellow/cyber orange with peach hint to right

I checked the color charts. That, apart from the barbs and posts, is what’s going on.

968: Fenceposts in love with gravity