God gave us memory
so that we might have
roses in December.
– James M. Barrie
And cameras so that we don’t need to rely on our memories, I guess. This seems like a better idea every day.
These photos, of course, were taken just yesterday in a place where God gives us roses in January. She also gave us an upright and bushy-tailed rodent of some sort . . .
As I write this, it’s Saturday. That means tomorrow will be Sunday. There’s only one problem: It’s been Sunday every day this week since Tuesday.
New Year’s Eve is an event that cries out to be held/observed on the same day of the week every year. It practically demands to be exempted from the usual week-in, week-out flow of our lives. And if it doesn’t cry out or make this demand, then I do.
What was I thinking? I had the perfect How it Started, How it’s Going set-up and I failed to get the before photo. A proxy photo will give you an idea, but this adjacent closet in our temporary abode in Tempe still bears my imprint from last year, when I stacked all the pool towels that had been stuffed all higgledy-piggledy into their assigned space, first folding them so they *could* be stacked.
How it started (proxy photo)
Some of us are independent. Loners, even.
Great blue heron, fishing
Some of us thrive in crowds.
Sandhill cranes, hanging out
Some prefer small groups.
Sandhill cranes, browsing/gleaning
Different strategies–*wildly* different strategies–can work equally well, but it’s good to know who we are.
I don’t get out at night much, but when I do, sometimes I find a nice reflection in a vehicle.
Here’s one from several years ago in Myrtle Beach.
Here’s one from this week in Texas.
It’s a wonderful world, innit?
The sun did not rise this morning.
That’s a steal of, or as I like to frame it, an homage to, a line from The List of Adrian Messenger. In that 1959 detective novel, the sun did not rise in London due to a “pea souper”: a thick, thick fog that blotted out the sun (and that hid a cunning murderer, as it turned out). Today, the sun did not rise in Texas due to a thunderstorm so broad, and with clouds so dark, that the sunrise never broke through.
I can’t claim that travel expands the mind, but I have observed that it expands the waistline and the photography portfolio.
As we headed south from Ottawa en route to Phoenix via Myrtle Beach, we passed through upstate New York. Just a few weeks ago they’d had a few feet of snow dumped on them, apparently to celebrate American Thanksgiving. It’s a local custom, I believe: as a Canadian, I don’t really feel qualified to comment on it. Now that snow was mostly gone.
But all the water in that snow had to go somewhere. Some of it sublimated, likely; some lay in the fields, clearly (but also muckily); some ran off into streams, creeks, sloughs, and ponds, certainly. I’m used to waterways being high in the spring: seeing them high-from-snow-melt in late December was a first.
The hardest thing(y) about this face was figuring out what to call its location. Being for leftovers, it’s not a takeout box. Being a box, it’s not a doggie bag. Quora to the rescue again: it’s a to-go box. I think I knew that. Sort of. Remembering the things I know is getting harder all the time.
Anyway, I present herein a to-go box. With heavily lidded eyes and a chiseled Roman nose.
Posted: 2025 Jun 28
