It’s been on-and-off rain showers all day. When I think about on-and-off paired with rain showers, I feel it’s likely redundant, so I check and yes, sort of. Mind you, the first thing on the search page that comes up when I just search for rain shower is, you know, a rain shower, nicely defined for us by Cambridge:
a type of shower (= a device you stand under to wash yourself) that releases small drops of water
coming from directly above you
So I change my search to rain shower meaning, and now I get the (short) period of rain options. Opinions vary on how short short is: according to the AI summary (and who am I to disagree?) it can mean a few minutes or a few hours. I guess we all have our own rained experience.
Anyway, now that we haven’t settled that, let’s just say that it had been raining lightly and intermittently (= on and off) all day. In this moment it is off. I disemcar in the Loblaw(s) parking lot and pick my way through puddles towards the front door. What’s this? Ah, a typical seasonal sight in this run-up to Hallowe’en: a nice pile of pumpkins beside said door. More nicely, a puddle of puddles at the end of the parking lane offers a lovely reflection of the pumpkins, but too far away to get a good photo. Fishing my phone out of my purse, I move closer.
Sploosh.
A car turning out of our parking lane onto the main driving lane carelessly drives through the puddles, killing the extended reflection. Why don’t people watch where they’re going?
I pause, wondering whether the puddles will reconstitute themselves.
Sploosh.
Sigh. OK, I’ll take the reflection I *can* get. It isn’t what I wanted, exactly, but it reminds me of it.
This line of thinking triggers some long-ago learning about Plato’s philosophy, here tidily summarized by the ever-willing Google AI:
The objects we perceive with our senses
are temporary and imperfect reflections
of their corresponding Forms.
That never did make sense to me, but if Plato had been a modern photographer, he might have phrased it thusly:
The reflections in our photographs
are imperfect reflections
of the perfect reflections we see.
Frustrating? Sure. But how lovely to have seen the unattainable ones before the inevitable sploosh, and how fine to have come home with a souvenir.
Plato was speaking in the realm of philosophical idealism: everything is a reflection of “the good,” not the “good” itself.
Tom
Tom – 🙂 Maybe I speak in the realm of photographic realism.
Maybe the big bonus here is that you did not get splooshed!?
Sometimes we have to settle for the second best as a memory of the unattainable “first best”
It is always frustrating how the camera doesn’t have the built-in filters your eyes and mind have when looking at a scene (and photoshop can’t restore what the camera saw back to what you saw)
Although on the plus side, the camera sometimes sees things you didn’t – a bug, a bird looking just the right way, a pattern in the leaves etc.
Jim R – 🙂 True, I hadn’t counted being dry as a bonus, and it definitely was. I often find that a photo is less memorable than what I saw, mostly due to clutter that it faithfully recorded and my brain edited out.
Wonderful to see the perfection in a Loblaw’s parking lot. I think I am in head-down, cart-pushing mode most of the time. And I do like the pumpkins themselves, with reflection. The lighting makes the picture sing! If pictures do sing.
Judith – Also a good point. Parking lots are often grotty, so it’s nice to have a nice take-away.
I don’t know. All those pumpkins piled up like that makes me sad. One pumpkin on its own is rather epic and unique, but all together it just looks like a boring accumulation of for-profit greed.
Like the way I don’t like parking lot dividers that are lined with thousands of pretty round pebbles (that took eons to get so smooth). I only think of all those little creatures’ homes that were stripped away, often from some babbling brook. I just see a huge claw scraping a natural, beautiful idyl raw. Like bottom fishing with massive nets that scoop up Everything.
P.S. And when did a couple days of Halloween become The SEASON of Halloween and it starts two months before the day? If that is now so deemed, then it should be — The Tsunami of Christmas. (Another holiday that is obscenely commercial.)
I better stop. I’m depressing myself.
Barbara – Yes, it sounds a bit depressing. I think I saw Hallowe’en candy in the stores before Labour Day (before the end of August, even), and Valentine’s Day candy reliably appears right after New Year’s. There is no respite. Maybe it would help to let individual retailers know how you feel – but maybe not. Now I’m depressed.
This early pushing of whatever is just another thing we have to ignore. Or laugh at I guess. There are lots of other things right now to worry about. So thankful I live in Canada.
Barbara – Fair enough. Maybe that’s a good working definition of sanity: knowing what to ignore, and when.
This adventure leaves me with the same warm and fuzzy feeling as visit with Mr. Rogers, which is especially appreciated since I am recovering from (I hope) Lyme disease.
Laurna – Oh, no! That’s for the Lyme disease, not the recovery therefrom. I hope you caught it early.
I did. And happened to have a fresh Rx for amoxicillin on hand so the weekend discovery that this particular tick (of dozens I have extracted over my lifetime) was making me quite sick wasn’t an emergency. I should have alcohol at hand during the extraction since the head broke off and I was running around looking for better tweezers instead of stopping potential contamination. I can touch base with my doctor today by phone. About a week should take care of the symptoms according to the public health guidelines. Other tick-related illness with similar symptoms is exceedingly rare. Lyme disease cases in Ontario are approaching 3,000.
Laurna – Excellent. So nice to have both online supports and a real-live family doctor.
Isabel – while Hallowe’en may start earlier and earlier each year, at least it doesn’t come with something like some radio stations switching to nothing but Christmas carols for the entire month of December. Bah. Humbug!
John – Fair enough. I agree with you about the (generally insipid) Christmas music played starting right after Hallowe’en, some years. For Hallowe’en music on the radio I can only think of The Monster Mash and Flying Purple People-Eater. But here’s a playlist for anyone feeling deprived.