Category Archives: Photography

Odds and Ends…and Beginnings

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Since I now have a Facebook account, I have been posting many of my photographs there to share with my immediate family instead of on my blog. I feel like I have rather neglected my Blog family, though, so I thought I’d catch you up with some of my favorite shots.

This one is simply a prairie beauty, the Fringed Gentian. Take a moment to read D.H. Lawrence’s poem Bavarian Gentians – he captures the dark, sensual mystery of this flower quite well. 

I found the gentians while on a walk with my son and future daughter-in-law. They represent the Beginnings in the title of this post. 

My son has asked me to do a special photo shoot of them next month down at Starved Rock in Illinois. I’m excited (and a little nervous!) about that.

Steve & I had a wonderful late summer road ramble last Saturday. We’re planning a 12-day camping trip for next month, possibly to Superior National Forest in MN. I’m looking forward to photographing more Fall color, mushrooms, and another Great Lake. 

And work continues at the Conservation Foundation. I try to get outside locally to remind myself why it’s important to preserve the natural spaces around here. 

Thanks for visiting this blog and Happy Fall! I hope you get outside often to enjoy the changing season. 

All photographs © Priscilla Galasso, 2017. All rights reserved.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Layered

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The forests of Wisconsin are layered. Up in the canopy, the broad leaves of maples, oaks, hickories, lindens and elms filter out the sun. Down on the forest floor, amid the fallen trunks and branches of those hardwood sentinels,  nestled in the needles of firs and pines and alongside the fronds of ferns, you can find a world of fungi hard at work converting biomass to soil. This is the understory, a very earthy layer – it’s at ground zero and grass roots, and it’s beautiful, colorful and diverse. 

Layered

Weekly Photo Challenge: Waiting

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Waiting…
It’s a natural process. Waiting for the sun to rise in the sky. Waiting for its warmth to reach the earth, to reach this spot. Waiting for the vessels to dilate, the blood to flow, the muscles to quicken. Waiting for life to unfold in its due time.
The desert is a good place to wait and a good place to watch for changes. It has much to teach us. We would suffer if we lost so great a teacher. 

Waiting

Weekly Photo Challenge: Structure

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I’m gonna show my age and admit that when I hear the word “structure”, I can’t help remembering Madeline Kahn in Paper Moon telling Tatum O’Neill that she’s got good ‘bone struck-cha’. 

How my sisters and I giggled over that line!

I do love the resilience of ancient structures, man-made…

…and natural. 

I wonder what structures will crumble in my lifetime, and which will remain for my children’s children. What kind of masonry am I working on now? I work for a Land Trust. I like to think I’m working on building a network of green space that will resist development…forever. 

 
Structure

The Grandparent Project: Part Sixteen

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I’ve been posting snapshots from years past to this blog to create an online family photo album for my mom and siblings in California and my kids in the Midwest. I’ve gone from 1985-2006 in 15 posts. I’ve gone through all my photo books and boxes of loose prints, and I think I’ve gotten all the best ones converted to digital images.

I did come across a couple that I want to add here, even though they’re out of sequence. These are pictures of my kids in places of historical significance to our family, proving that I did teach them something about our particular “heritage”. For instance, this sacred natural place just blocks from the first house I lived in…

…and this one of the beach where 4 generations of our family have vacationed… …and where my husband and I met up with my parents’ longtime friends.

Now, back to the chronology. In January of 2007, I took a trip out to California alone to visit the family. Things were pretty hectic back in the Midwest with two kids in college, two in high school, and a husband on kidney dialysis. Escaping to the Bay Area to soak up some family love and laughter (and a couple of bottles of Hecker Pass kissing wine!) helped. 

Visiting my father was a high priority, even though he did not remember or respond to me. 

Watching my mother care for him was a great lesson to me. I figured I’d be walking in her footsteps as a caretaker for my ailing husband, but I had no way of knowing that I’d be widowed the next year.

Before that happened, we had a few more exciting family events. In April, Emily starred in Seussical. Her Aunt Maggie and cousins James and Dylan from her dad’s side of the family flew out to see the show. 

In June, Rebecca graduated from High School and Susan gave her Senior Voice Recital and got her college diploma from Lawrence University.

GranneLouise, Uncle David, and Aunt Sarah came out for the ceremony in Wisconsin and then drove to meet us for a reunion at the beach cottage on the other side of Lake Michigan. 

That final vacation with my husband is full of bittersweet memories. I’m so grateful that both my families were there to share it with me and to remind me that we were together in all of the simultaneous beginnings and endings of that summer.

Actually, I like to think of universal Life simply as continuation in many different forms. Through all its changes, the star stuff of the cosmos just keeps going. 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Corner

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Standing on the corner…is this a familiar corner? Or are you just passing through this place, this place in time and history? Where are you headed? Straight on? Or will you decide to turn? Which way? Right? Left? Or a complete turn-about?
So many decisions, choices that could lead to adventure or conflict or character change. 
Whatever corner of the world, whatever corner of your life journey you find yourself standing at…I wish you happiness and peace. 

Corner

Weekly Photo Challenge: Ooh, Shiny!

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“Hey, look! A plastic castle!”

No thank you. Plastic? Yuck. Man made? Not interested. 

My favorite diversions, distractions, and delightful detours are definitely of the flowers-and-butterflies variety.

Polygonia comma

Gray treefrog

Blue vervain

But to tell you the truth, these things are not merely beautiful bagatelles. These are the elements of a grand eco-system, the intrinsic parts of a working Universe. And so I am trying to be that disciplined, working person that focuses on protecting these habitats. They are not my distraction, then, they are my day plan. 

Ooh, Shiny!