Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Two by two.


This is a true thing:

This afternoon, I got into my car and drove and drove, making the rounds, seeing my places. I went far from here, came back. I drove with the windows down, in silence, my hair whipping. I talked to myself, inside my head and maybe even aloud, for hours.

I saw an Amish buggy ahead on Zion Road and slowed down so that I would not impinge upon it. I took an early turn from Zion, to pass over hills and around curves. As I turned, I saw two goats--one young, one old--standing side by side, watching the horse that was drawing the buggy.

This is a true thing:

Today someone dear to me is in pain, and when I ask for a way to be helpful I am given silence, and all I can give back to the quiet from this distance is hope.

This is a true thing:

Today the sun was so warm and the air so light that I skipped out on my workday and spent the last two hours of daylight walking and walking, bearing both cameras and photographing everything. I took 225 photographs. I practiced changing my good lens from one body to the other. I crouched next to a prairie and loved its tendrils. I thought of my brother, whose new boss asked him during his interview, "Are you a Nikon guy or a Canon guy?" I turn out to be a Canon girl. It's a cosmically bad joke--and one that I can make doubly bad: this literary critic shoots with Canon.

This is a true thing:

When these two geese flew over as the sun was going down, I tried to take their picture but had a crucial setting wrong on the camera. And I was worried for them; they seemed lost and frantic, hovering alone, the rest of their vee nowhere to be seen. They left me alone with a sky of hanging hawks. I counted: twenty hawks, circling together. A few minutes later, I could hear the geese coming around again, and this time I was ready. I have wanted a good picture of Canada geese for probably five years. It's no easy thing to get; somehow they get grossly sentimentalized when they're made into art, and I have never had the equipment or the know-how to get my own image. What I wanted was an image that would make me feel the way I feel when I hear them coming back as the winter slips away.

What I wanted were the geese I got.

3 Comments:

Blogger Boricua en la Luna said...

Perhaps the geese came around again just so you could get that picture you always wanted. Sometimes, the universe does move in the strangest of ways... :) I love the geese, too!

9:14 AM, March 14, 2007  
Blogger Radish King said...

Love this.

2:51 PM, March 14, 2007  
Blogger Dr. S said...

Thanks! And it's good to see you here!

4:01 PM, March 14, 2007  

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