Category Archives: Photography
Weekly Photo Challenge: Structure
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. 
The Grandparent Project: Part Sixteen
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
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.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Ooh, Shiny!
“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.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Elemental
“Explore the classical elements of earth, air, water, and fire. How do you capture something invisible like air, or the movement of water? Or, more personally, is there a place you go to feel connected to the earth?”
Air, water and fire form a double rainbow touching Earth.
Sitting on the ground beside a lake, the campfire behind him dancing in the air.
Connected to the earth, from head to toe.
The Grandparent Project: Part Ten
Family Cluster
The Grandparent Project is my online family photo album, connecting my West Coast family and my Midwest grown children in shared memories. GranneLouise has seven grandchildren in all, spanning eight years. Here’s how they all looked in the year 2000. 
So, this is the Millennial generation of our family.
Like many families, we also have a coincidental grouping of birthdays. Our “Cluster Month” is August. My husband and I, my brother, my brother-in-law, my grandmother…and I think my grandfather, too…all have birthdays in August. I’m going to take a stab at assigning the exact dates, and I’ll let my family correct me where I’m wrong. Jim’s is the 26th, mine is the 21st, David’s is the 18th, John’s is the 25th, Grandma Marion’s was the 1st…and Grandpa David’s was the 23rd. (*confirmed by GranneLouise)
I also have a cluster of photos from these middle years of our kids’ lives up to the year 2000. If you want to see the gallery of pictures in a slide show of full-sized images, just click on the first one and advance one by one.
This concludes the first 15 years of grandparenting. The next 17 years saw fewer cross country visits as all our lives got more complicated, so my photo records of those years are pretty sparse, but the stories are pivotal. Moving toward adulthood brought challenges and opportunities that shaped the character and personality of each of these young people. I think they’re all super special, and I’ll share that in the next Grandparent Project post.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Textures
Nature loves to combine textures with remarkable contrast.
Spine-prickly and petal-soft:
Cold, smooth, and rough:
Fuzzy and rigid:
Smooth, rough and bumpy:
Wet slippery, dry and grainy:
Everywhere you look, Nature feels wonderful.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Satisfaction
We collect estate sale items for our home business, Scholar and Poet Books. Most of these are books, but we also specialize in recorded music, sheet music, and puzzles. We picked up a collection of about 300 jigsaw puzzles from a church rummage sale a few years ago. In order to resell them, we had to determine whether or not we had all the pieces. The only way to do that was to put them together. And so we began to assemble and photograph puzzles. That was about 2 1/2 years ago. We’ve become pretty adept at doing puzzles. We get great satisfaction in finding that all the pieces are included in these second-hand puzzle boxes .
However, sometimes a greater satisfaction is coming across a cool, vintage puzzle made from real wood, with ornate and elaborate “gazintas” – as in this “goes into” that. Steve gave me one that immediately reminded me of the Pastime Puzzles that my grandmother kept at her beach cottage. I lifted the lid and breathed in the aroma of old wood. I put it together while I was sick in bed with a cold. It was only a small puzzle, not like the ones my family would put together on the table in the living room. I realized there was one piece missing, but I wasn’t disappointed. It meant that it would be worth less in resale value, so I might as well keep it.
So “satisfaction” is not necessarily a complete puzzle. Satisfaction is enjoying the moment of discovery, the journey of working on a project, and the pleasure of keeping a memory alive.
Weekly Photo Challenge: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Do you see something….unusual…in this photo?
Blue ‘Shroom, I saw you standing alone….
It’s a lactarius indigo edible mushroom. The latex or milk that oozes from it turns from blue or blue/gray to green when it is cut open. I’ve only seen this one.
And what’s wrong with this picture?
Boys in shorts, green grass and blooming flowers, and…snow on the ground?
Okay, I’m kidding. That’s not snow. It’s flower petals from the tree overhead.
scillagrace 