If you look at Lenore, you will smile. It is her gift, and her power. Today I think I finished my short stories. Fourteen of them. Some editing to do, but I’ll turn them into my agent in the next week or so. Hope they don’t come flying back, as they often do. I love the short story form. I would love to do another. And I have a strong non-fiction ideas as well. Rain, rain today. Want some sun.
More and more, my camera draws me to the broken doors and open windows and lonely old stone walls, windows into lost souls and a lost world. Today, while driving around looking for doors and windows, I listened to Bob Dylan. I think, when I look at the stone walls and broken houses of Lost America, of his song, “Ring Them Bells,” which these places evoke. And I think of the child who cries, and when innocence dies, and I want to cry myself.
“Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf,
Ring them bells for all of us who are left,
Ring them bells for the chosen few
Who will judge the many when the game is through.
Ring them bells, for the time that flies,
For the child that cries
When innocence dies.”
“Ring Them Bells,” by Bob Dylan
Rose is my guiding spirit. She will look for that squirrel every day of her life, whether or not he ever appears again. She is unflagging, focused, determined. She inspires me.
Barn, Bunker Hill Road
I had some important revelations sitting in Quaker Meeting yesterday, in the deepening silence, listening to the wind. It felt like my place, my home, a safe and spiritual place. I understand that forgiveness is also about acceptance. Learning not to judge. Moving past anger. Moving past fear, past the geography of pain and trauma.
In the Meeting, I began forgiving myself, and drawing a boundary between those times and these. We all did our best, including my Mother, a tormented woman who drove the people she loved the most far away. I do not want to do the same thing. I remembered yesterday going to my first Quaker Meeting when I was 14 and drinking in the silence and the peace, and sharing the values and simplicity. I lost some of those feelings, and returning was profound for me. This is a week of good decisions, and important ones. I will share them, as always.
I want to work on letting go of much of my life, and looking ahead. Hard to do, easy to say. It’s taken awhile to get there. A long, long time.
Egg notecards. Up for viewing and ale on the Redux site. I said earlier in the week that the cards were up on the site, but now they really are, for Easter, Mother’s Day, Spring, or just to have. This is my Daily Egg series, which seemed, for mysterious reasons, to catch on. I loved the shape of the eggs, and the color backdrop against which to photograph them. Lots of you urged me to find ways of making the photos affordable. You were definitely heard.
I became quite fond of chickens. They are industrious and purposeful. These notecards include the Blue-Ribbon Washington County Fair photo contest winner at the lower left, a mystical view of chickens. Redux has paypal. The notecards were my solution to the dilemma of offering the photos at affordable prices and also finding a good use for the photographs. I’m doing stone walls next.
The third new notecard series offers flowers, mostly from the farm. I’m partial to these. Bright colors began appearing in my photographs about the time I met Maria, and these certainly brighten my day. They are the ones I use the most.They are also up on the Redux site for viewing and purchase. For the summer – Dogs In The Garden, Barns, Lost America. Maybe Last Days of A Dairy Farm.
