Soooo… I’m looking for challenges or prompts to inspire me.
You understand, right? I wantto post on a regular basis, but the question is what to post!
Dawn, a blogger that I follow, posted a photo that she called Triptych Crop. Her photo reminded me of a photo I have on my desk (someday I’ll post a picture of it) that is from Varde, Denmark, circa 1900. It’s the kind of photo that pulls you in. I followed Dawn’s rabbit trail which led me to a photography challenge called Unusual Crop.
Well, after looking at 60+ year old photos of my brothers playing chess, I went back to that album and cropped photos of each of my siblings (and me) from that same time period. I don’t know if the crops are unusual, but here’s what’s left of the photos I cropped:
I had put out a request asking for seniors who would be interested in playing games after school with the children who come to the facility where I work.
A man stopped in my office. “I’d like to teach kids to play chess,” he said.
He had a magazine that showed a large group of children playing chess on the cover.
“In a lot of places,” the man said, “kids start learning chess at the age of 6.”
I immediately thought of this series of photos of my two older brothers. It’s from 1963 or 64, which would mean my brothers were probably 6 and 9.
This is my own A-to-Z Challenge for the month of June — likes and dislikes. I’ve fallen behind but haven’t given up! If you want to join me, just add a comment naming something you like and something you don’t like that begin with the letter H.
I’m such a rule-breaker. I didn’t find a picture in a magazine, newspaper, or wherever. My first thought, probably because of writing about my roots yesterday, was this picture of the house where I grew up.
circa 1967, hand-tinted by my sister
I found the photo, not where I thought it would be but close. I showed it to my daughter, Mary.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It’s this house,” she said. Clearly she didn’t hold the deep affection for it that I have.
“But look — there’s the front porch! And the side porch,” I pointed out. “They’re both gone now.”
“There’s still sort of a side porch,” she said.
And she’s right. The side porch in the photo is gone and has been replaced with a room we call the sun porch. I can still remember the year we went to the state fair and my mother dragged my father over to the display of modular-type rooms that could be added to the house. The next year, the side porch was torn down and the sun porch was installed.
The front porch has been long gone. I still remember the hammock that had been hung there and my father telling us ghost stories out there on summer nights.
The house faces west and my parents used to always go sit on the front porch after dinner with coffee (instant — yuck!) and watch the sun sink over Grasslands hill.
I love the house. It holds so many happy memories for me.
Here’s a photo of a house I drive by when I’m going to Syracuse. It’s on a back road, and I’ve watched its slow demise. When I saw that it had fallen, I stopped to take a picture.
When I would drive past it with Mary, she would often say, “I would love to explore that house.”
There’s something intriguing about abandoned houses.
I took the picture to send to Mary. A missed opportunity to explore.
I don’t know that I like abandoned houses. I certainly don’t like the wreckage of a house. It’s sad. I can’t help but wonder who holds the memories of the happy times that may have happened in that house.
Scottish Gaelic: Is toil leam dachaigh mo leanabachd. I like my childhood home. Cha toil leam long-bhriseadh taighe. I don’t like the wreckage of a house.
How about you? What’s something you like that begins with H? What’s something you don’t like?
Bud said that he woke up in the middle of the night wondering if it was the right decision.
I reminded him all the reasons why — the catalytic converter, the exhaust system, the timing belt, the short circuits in the electrical system.
Still, our Honda Odyssey had taken us many miles — well over 200,000. Many trips to Florida, to South Carolina, to North Carolina, to Washington, DC, as well as the hundreds, maybe over a thousand trips between Cooperstown and Greene.
It’s almost as old as Laurel.
It has served us well.
When Philip was a little boy and we traded in one of our cars, he drew sad faces in the dirt on the windows. Laurel did the same last night with the Odyssey. My bookend children think the same.
I had tossed and turned all night. My thoughts were a twisting turning knot of turmoil.
Before dawn, I left the house and drove to the lake.
Water soothes me.
If I lived near the ocean, I’m sure I would have been at the beach, digging my toes into the sand. Instead, I was at Lakefront Park in Cooperstown, walking in dew-laden grass, looking out into the heavy fog that rested on the lake.
As the invisible sun rose and lent a little light, I took a few pictures. The lush green of summer was accentuated by the grayness of the fog.
The fog obscured the distance, but it helped me appreciate what was closest to me.
I loved the idea of reenacting a piece of art for this week’s photo challenge: Life Imitates Art
But what to do?
I asked Laurel if she would sit on my lap and put her hand on my cheek, like a Mary Cassatt painting, but she said no. It probably would have looked kind of strange anyway. She may be my baby, but she’s taller than me now.
So — swimming. I decided to ask my swimmers to recreate some swimming posters.
This one — Michael Phelps doing streamline — I just wanted them to see. Streamline is such a foundational skill. We work on it from Day 1 of swim season — and still, about half look nothing like this, hand over hand, squeezing the head.
Michael Phelps — Streamline
I stood on the balcony and took pictures of each swimmer leaving the wall in streamline. For you photo-geeks, all I have is a little Sony Cyber-shot that I bought on sale at Target for $59. I guess you get in clarity what you pay for.
Streamline
Still, it was a great learning experience for the kids. I showed each one the picture I had taken of them and we talked about how they could make their streamlines even better.
For fun, at the end of practice, we tried to recreate another swim poster.
I pulled our little Kodak PlaySport out of retirement (it can take underwater photographs), charged it up, and prayed that it would work. Laurel was the photographer as each one of my swimmers did a cannonball off the diving board. This was the best shot.
Cannonball!
Or this one.
Cannonball!!
So — thank you Daily Post for the photo challenge. I may not be much of a photographer, but this was fun.
Across from my parents’ house a little building we called the milk house used to stand. I don’t know that it was ever used for milking animals. We incorporated it into the pig pen at one point and later, when we had no pigs, used it for storage. The milk house was filled with shutters and windows and bee hives and rusty things and broken things and stuff.
And then the roof caved in.
My brother-in-law and my sister drove up from Florida with two carpet cleaners. After cleaning some of the carpets in my parents’ house, Gil went to work on the old milk house. When they drove back to Florida, they left behind the carpet cleaners and had in their car a cast iron pig trough and an old gate. It was the family version of the trading-up game.
Three walls of the milk house are still standing, one with a window facing the road.
A lonely pane of glass remains in an upper corner, dirty and dusty, care-worn. It’s my new favorite place to view the world.
My window to the world
If it weren’t so close to the road, and if trucks didn’t drive past not following the speed limit, roaring like monsters and shaking the earth, I might sit on the bank for hours and watch the spider weave its web and the leaves change color through that window.
I’m quite sure that somewhere in that window is at least one deep spiritual truth.
The Trinity framed out.
The light pouring through.
Now I see through a glass darkly, but with a slight shift of my eyes I see face to face.
The undeniable brokenness, no matter how neatly it is stacked.
Broken
What treasures lie in broken things!
My sister and her husband got a rusty pig trough which I have to admit was pretty cool, but I think I got the better treasure — a window to the world.
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 