As the 2022 growing season winds down in the Ottawa Valley, some parts of the country aren’t quite ready to throw in the towel. The Left Coast, for instance, still has abundant greenery.
Some is right at eye level, backlit by the angled sunlight.
Some is at the look-up-waaay-up level.
Even in that relatively temperate place, though, you can see the inevitable hurtling down the track.
You can also see a face-in-profile in the shadow (spiky hair, overhanging brow, eye socket, angular nose, and open mouth on the right side of the shadow).
Every day and every walk remind me that I don’t need to go the ends of the Earth to find beauty. It really is everywhere.
Nice !
Thanks!
Isabel
Great pictures!
A question: “Left coast?”
Works, I suppose, if you’re looking north from Ottawa, but what if you’re looking south from Alaska?
I know…picky, picky.
Tom
Tom – 🙂 I’m just a slave to the map convention of North being up.
Your photos evoke musical words, like ballad and symphony, ballet and harmony. The shadow on the rose leaf must be a pantomime.
A gloss among the dying leaves:
Left Coast (love it!) is the west coast the American Pie poet/singer Don MacLean surely is referencing when “The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost” left for it, departing from his musical history of the death of “genuine” country and rock ‘n’ roll music that developed at points east in the US (Appalachia in particular). But to “take the last train for glory” was the original meaning of the phrase MacLean borrowed, as used in Arlo Guthrie’s Last Train, meaning one’s last chance for salvation (“the last train to glory”) before the final judgement. What Buddy Holly, Ritchie Vallens, and the Big Bopper caught was the last plane to glory, when it crashed in Iowa. When “California” is substituted for “glory,” the meaning becomes ambiguous, because “to take the last train for the coast” is equivalent to saying, “I’m outta here.” But it can also mean the Left Coast, such as California. Whether MacLean means all that is good and right about music has sold out to Hollywood or that the influence of his ill-fated triumvirate of musical stars has disappeared for good and gone to glory, is unclear. Perhaps both meanings apply. He apparently provided his own gloss on the whole song in July, which I will bookmark for “soon.” Enjoy the Left Coast but come back soon!
Laurna – Thanks for the American Pie connection. Coming back in stages. 🙂