A List of Things I Am Thankful For In 2011

I was recently challenged to list one thing I am thankful for for each of the 21 days in November leading up to Thanksgiving Day. I tried to do them one by one, but I just can't keep up that sort of thing, so here goes a list all at once and in no particular order:

My spouse who supports me in my crazy plans and even helps implement them with me. 

My sons who are not children anymore but competent adults with opinions and ideas and goals all their own, who are smart and kind and generous and creative and inventive and compassionate and who remember to call their mother on the phone now and again, and their father who helped nurture all those things in them.
Their girlfriends who value their originality and compassion and individuality and do things to take care of them when I can't anymore because we live so far apart.
Friends who support me even when I'm a jerk.
My artwork that has brought me self-confidence and satisfaction and fulfillment and has brought me the company of other artists and has lead me to Mineral Point, Wisconsin.
Nature, especially prairie, and my gardens at my homes and the people who have shared time with me in them.
Music and musicians and especially local singer songwriters that you can see live and up close and musical instruments, and CDs and electronics that allow you to take it home and on the road with you.
Wild Ones Natural Landscapers organization that promotes end educates about native landscaping and the friends there.
Photography
Amazing parents
An amazing sister
The seasons and the changes in nature that it brings. The cycle of a day that brings morning light and warm glowing later afternoon light and night that brings starry skies and cicadas and morning that brings fog and dew and frost and songbirds' song.
Health and quality health care and healthcare professionals and researchers.
Flowers and florists and garden shops and nurseries and growers that supply them.
Facebook and reacquainting with old friends and meeting new friends .
Books and used book stores and small book stores.
Cats - also lemurs, horses, otters, tigers, dogs, and other animals - the companionship offered by some and the gracefulness, playfulness, and beauty of them all.
Hiking and backpacking and paddling and trips to the wilderness.
GPS's that help me with my total lack of a sense of direction and geocaching with my kids.
Schools and teachers and opportunities for individualized education.
Boy Scouts and leaders and parents and how it shaped my sons.

Lakes and rivers and paddling in them and overcoming fears so that I can enjoy the company of other paddlers and the solitude of a solo trip on the water.

Wood and making things with it like houses and furniture and such.
Good food and fine restaurants and chocolate and olives and raspberries and pomegranates and asparagus.
My senses, the ability to see color and light and the ability to hear a voice and music, the sense of touch to feel warm breeze and cool rain, the smell of a damp woods, dry corn fields, skunk, rosemary, flowers, and the essence of a loved one, the tastes of good food and salt in seaspray.

Lost Camera, Revisited

Some have kindly suggested that the loss of the camera frees me to enjoy the experience of paddling, to enjoy my hike in the woods, to enjoy the views and the flowers for their pure beauty instead of their potential as a photographic image, to experience the experience without the obligation to photograph.
While I appreciate the friendly efforts to console and cheer me, I cannot really relate to that advice.
To me, part of the joy of nature IS the joy of capturing it in a photograph. To me, there is joy in seeing a beautiful scene and in the process of deciding to frame just a certain part of it to convey a specific message. When you see, you see whole panoramas, you see objects in their situation and in their relationship to all the things around them, but in making an art image, you must edit out much of that and make a conscious choice of what to include and what to exclude. Those decisions determine what message the viewer will take away from the art. Sometimes, there is more than one message, such as the beauty of an individual tree in fall foliage, the beauty of that tree surrounded by others of different shape and color, the separate beauty of the relationship of the reddening leaves to the red rock that gives our Lake Redstone its name, the shape of the individual leaf, or even the vein pattern on part of that leaf. Sometimes, the plant covered in flower is one message and the individual flower with pollen drifted onto its leaves is another and the visiting bee, with its leg pollen sacks stuffed to overflowing is yet another. Ferns say one thing from this angle with the leaf litter under the fronds and another thing from another angle where they rise up to the sky. Lit from behind, the leaf is a glowing bright green that stuns while photographed from the same side as the light source presents a more solid earthy sheen to the surface. Photographing the nature is a way to look at it more deeply, in more detail, to explore the relationships among the parts of the natural world, and to enjoy far more about it than would be seen at first glance. Photographing, or rather the looking and the deciding what message to convey, make nature a richer experience for me and allow me to see more deeply into the relationships and more precisely into the details. Quick, how many lobes on a maple leaf? What is the back side of a white oak leaf like? Where are the legs attached to a bee's body? In taking the photographs and viewing them later, these sorts of things can be studied and learned.
Photography to me is NOT an obligation but a joy, and a way in which I experience more fully the joy that is out there in the world. It is also a reason to linger. Someone might think me a kook if I just stopped and lingered too long in front of their house to look at their magnolia tree buds or their rose shrub thorns quite closely, but if I have a camera in hand, I can inspect and peek and stare and study and no one calls the police or yells at me or send their dog after me. They just smile at the crazy camera lady and leave me be to my joyful soaking in of the details of the world.
And then there is the sharing it with you. I NEED those images to show to my kids and to my spouse and to my mom and to my sister, to email around to friends. to post on this blog, to post on Facebook, to share my story. "I went for a paddle today" is some news, yes, but accompanied with a dozen of the finest shots, it makes other people smile a little bit and hopefully inspires them to get outdoors for a paddle or a walk on a trail or even just around their neighborhood, and maybe the pictures of the things closeup makes them walk a little slower and look a little harder and notice things of beauty that might have been missed. Maybe it makes them love nature a little bit more and support the conservation efforts of some local organization or vote for the candidate who has a 'green' record.
A walk or a paddle with no camera is just me alone, but with a camera, I bring you all along and share it with you in that little way and it is not just me alone anymore but all of us loving nature and our surroundings together. Yeah, it really it that big. I need my camera!

The Lake's Steely Grip

I've heard the tales of others' mishaps, dropped keys, eyeglasses, sunglasses, fishing tackle, favored barware dropped from the pontoon boat serving as party barge, tools dropped while assembling and dissassembling the dock or working on a boat motor, and the very modern versions with dropped cell phones and GPS devices. So when I am out paddling in my little canoe with my treasured camera, I have a system. The camera goes into the chest pocket of my life vest in a zip lock bag. When I am taking landscape photos of the scenery and fellow paddlers, the wrist strap of the camera is snapped into the strap that holds that pocket closed. I can take most pictures with the camera safely snapped into its combined pocket strap/wrist strap tether. When I need to reach out to take a shot of a shoreline flower or the leaves of an overhanging branch, the wrist strap goes around my wrist where it belongs. Alas, the weak point in that fine chain of safety procedures is the transfer point between pocket and wrist, and it was just such a weak point that allowed my beloved camera to be stolen from me last week. I was drifting under some overhanging shoreline branches trying to shoot a little bright green plant growing in a leaf litter filled gap in a tree root that had been eroded bare along the bank, when I decided I had to put the camera away and do some serious remaneuvering to get around an offending shrub that was blocking the perfect angle. I had slipped the camera off my wrist and was moving it to the vest pocket when my boat drifted me into a tree branch that snagged the camera and some other part of me or my boat then released itself to fling the camera out into the water. At least that is what I think happened. One moment I was sliding the camera into its plastic bag lined pocket and the next, I was watching bubbles rise about a foot and an half from my boat.
I stared at the bubbles, stunned. I cussed. I tried to look down into the water to see if it was visible. I stuck my paddle straight down in to see how deep it was: about 4 feet. When you can't swim, four feet under water might as well be fifty. There was no way I could go into the water along that shore of rocky boulders to ever try to get it back, especially not when out there alone. The lake had my camera as though in a steel trap, as though buried a dozen yards underground, as though on the surface of the moon. I would not be taking any more pictures with that one or even retrieving from it all the wonderful shots I had taken so far that day. I cussed some more. I cried. I called my husband on my cell phone, daring the risk of the loss of another electronic devise. He said it was just stuff and to enjoy the rest of my paddle. I cried some more. And paddled away, after one last look at the unphotographed pretty little plant growing in the tree root. And I paddled resolutely down the middle of the channel to the lake. With no camera to photograph it, I chose to avoid the shoreline with its taunting spring wildflowers and fresh green mosses and ferns and rock shapes and sculptural tree roots. I stayed out farther in the deeper water and paddled continuously, testing my stamina and my fears of the deeper waters. I paddled one landmark past the farthest I have paddled alone and then turned around to head for home. It was about then, in that last half hour before sunset, that the light wind diminished totally, and the clear bright light of the low angled sun made the shoreline trees glow warm and brilliant. The reflections in the water were perfect, rippled slightly in a uniform pattern, much like looking at a mirror made of antique rolled glass. I could read the words of the shoreline signs in their reflections, I could see individual catkins on the reflections of the birch trees, I could count the five individual needles that identify the shoreline trees as white pines in their beautiful perfect reflections. Ah, the photographs I could have taken. But I just paddled slowly, cognizant of the limited daylight left in which to make my way back to the home dock. I stopped now and then to drift and soak in the beautiful perfect views. It occurred to me at one point that the views were so perfect that it was as if there was no surface to the water and I was suspended above a perfect upside down world. I decided not to dwell on that thought too long, lest it rouse my latent fear of heights to combine with my suppressed fear of water which might come to bad result in my heightened emotional state of loss about the camera and joy about the beauty around me. So I paddled and drifted and enjoyed the amazing reflections of the beautiful nature of the lake.
And in case you are fond of details, I ordered a replacement camera last night. It was a $215 mistake.

My Uncle's Garden

My Uncle has an amazing garden. He has recently added a fancy kitchen and family room to the back of the house. The addition has a massive window facing the garden. There is a large beautiful antique multi-pane window on the back of his woodshop that also faces the garden. They frame wonderful views to the garden. He has gardened for very many years, and the garden is backed now with mature semi-dwarf apple trees, so that when I was there in mid-September, the branches were drooping heavy with pretty red fruit. The foreground of the garden is roses along the edge of the deck and the midground is raised beds of individual species of flowers, Asiatic lilies, purple coneflowers. He built the arbor, in the woodshop, of cedar with no nails; it is held together with pegged joinery. From the house, the view is breathtaking. It is restful to sit and visit with the garden out there and it is a nice little outing to go stroll along the paths between the beds and visit the individual areas. It is not quite accurate to call it my Uncle's garden, for although he started it so many years ago and is the driving force behind it, he does not really work on it anymore for health and mobility reasons. His wife, my Aunt, does nearly all the work now, but she still gives him credit, ownership, I guess out of habit. I guess that is what people do for each other when they have been married for over 40 years. They apologized that the flowers were done or past their peak and though I got some nice close-ups, I chose to photograph the garden as a whole by the reflection on the woodshop window, for it captures the allusion and romance and subtle beauty that is there. I love my Uncle's garden, because it is beautiful, but also because of the people who make it.

Beauty in Strange Places

Surprises

I parked illegally to dash into the store and came out to find this beautiful leafy shadow on my dashboard. Sometimes you find it where you least expect it. The composition changed with the breeze and it went in and out of focus, so had it not been in perfect focus when I came back to the car, I might never have noticed it.

Raindrops on Roses, Well, Okay, Pansies

I had a wonderful friend who was a photographer. I was in my teens and he introduced me to a number of concepts. He was my first adult cross-gender friend. As a teen girl, you might have 'boy' friends, but because they are never quite removed from the 'datable' pool, you are not quite as 'free' with them as you might be with girl friends. But he was married, a minister, and much older. Not 'datable' so more 'friendable'. He was also my first friend that was not my age. It never really occurred to me that you could have friends that were not your age. There were potential friends among people your age, and there were 'little kids' and 'old people'. But he and I became friends based on a shared hobby of photography. I traveled once with him and his family and on that trip, we photographed together. Mountain scenery, close-ups of wildflowers, people, each other, bits of strange folk culture, more scenery, more flowers. He taught me many things, technical and technique, but he also exposed me to the idea of a philosophy of art. He explained his 'rules' to me and made it clear that they were not the same as the timing-and-aperture-and-ASA sorts of technical things that were truth based, but that these things were clearly of the take-it-or-leave-it variety. He also make it clear that I ought to be developing my own artistic philosophy, a reason for doing it and rules that I would adhere to. One if his 'pet peeves', if you will allow me to use a phrase that is one of MY pet peeves, was photographers who faked things. You were not allowed to spray water on the roses or move a bug from one flower to a more perfect one or to snip off an imperfect leaf. You photographed it as you found it and if there was an imperfection, you either skipped that shot or you made it part of the photograph. So when I see a flower with a naturally occurring drop of water, be it from morning or evening dew or after a rain, I love to rush out there and capture the drops of water, smugly sure that I did not spray them there! It is my little tribute to my photographer friend and my little chance to remember the things we talked about and the special friendship that we had so many years ago and that we carried on by letter, actual hand written letter, about every year or so until he died. And yeah, it WAS his turn to write . . .

Aaahhhhhhh . . . . . . . . . . .

Damn Redbuds!

This is one of the prettiest scenes ever that I have never been able to photograph to my satisfaction. Lacking real telephoto lenses, my point and shoot gives results only as good as this. The right way to shoot it would be from a boat in the middle of the pond, which is prohibited by Arboretum rules.

Who's with me on this caper during redbud season 2010?

Self-Portrait Convex

The Fake Sky That Really Was

I don't think much of the North Dakota landscape. I grew up there and to me, it is too flat, too boring, too nothing, not very interesting at all. Too much flat and much too boring to drive across and all pretty much the same for too many miles. But sometimes, like this day, it takes my breath away. This is how it really looked, patterns of light and shadow on the land and amazing colors of blue in the sky. I was glad to be alive and glad to be there!

Maidenhair Fern

The bright light green color and the thin delicate leaf and the very fine black wiry stem makes maidenhair fern one of my favorites. The Garfield Park Conservatory has many kinds, but there is one kind that grows outdoors and is a native woodland plant. It is difficult to look outdoors in March in Illinois and trust that things such as this lie below the ground, promising to emerge in just a few weeks to green the world once again.

Reflections at the Conservatory

The reflection is an imperfect copy of the original. But the muted colors can emphasize the shapes, the waves in the water add pattern and interest. Which is more beautiful, the thing itself or the thing reflected in the water? Or does the juxtaposition make each more beautiful? What do we reflect and how accurately? Do the imperfections in what we reflect make for better or worse? Do my photographs reflect the beauty of the place enough to make you want to go there? Or some conservatory like it that is near you?

Self-Portrait

This is me reflected in front headlamp chrome and the door lever of an aged Dodge pickup truck on an abandoned farmstead in rural North Dakota. The flash and swirl of orange red is my silk WomanSong scarf from 2007. This year, I bought a hide drum.

It's Flat Out Here

I have been driving many miles in many days through the flat land of the central part of the country, sometimes by chance, to get to people I want to visit and to places I want to to be, and sometimes by choice to experience it anew as a tourist and to attempt to capture some of its essence, as a photographer.
As a child, I took it for granted, the unending flatness of it, and had an odd notion of the word 'hill'. As a teen, I resented the boringness and distance and sameness of it all and could not wait to get out, as in 'get the hell out of here'. As a young adult I hated that it was a barrier of many long boring miles of car travel to seeing family and old friends. I really only began to give it a chance as being beautiful when a professional art photographer friend sent me photographs that treated it as a place of unique beauty and made me look closer for the details and appreciate the sense of place that is wrapped up in the horizon, the perspective, the vast plain and the vast sky. I have long loved the scenic beauty of the southwest desert, the rock formations and canyons. The epic beauty of the Rocky Mountains is common knowledge. The forests of the northeast and places like Kentucky where I have traveled are taken for granted as beautiful. I have more recently loved the rambling hills of Wisconsin. But now I have come to see the flat plains as another unique form of landscape that is every bit as beautiful, and I am taking it as a self-assigned project to capture some of that in photographs. It is a magical thing to stop the car and step out into the bean field and feel the wind through your clothes and hair and hear the chirping of thousands of grasshoppers and the rustling of the leaves of the bean plants. It is interesting to leave the car to wander the ditch of the narrow roads and find shorter versions of the prairie plants that are familiar to me, remnants of what once covered this vast land. The little bluestem along the roadsides glows russet in the late afternoon light. The clouds pile up on each other and recede to the horizon in layers of light and dark. The sun lights corn tassels a glowing orange-red and lights the nearly ripe bean fields a glowing yellow and the stubble of already harvested small grain fields glows soft gold. Light plays on the land and the sky to make ever changing colors and tints and shades and I am trying to learn to capture it. It might be my greatest challenge as a photographer to capture and convey the beauty of this place, for it is a hard beauty to love in its vast endlessness and its harsh extremes. But as I learn to love it, I also want to share it in pictures and words. Go there sometime, not just passing through, but with it as a destination, and drive its smaller roads and get out and just be there. You might be as surprised as I am at the power and beauty of the place.

Road Trip Aesthetics

Beauty is where you find it, but you'll only find it if you are paying attention to what is around you and open to the possibilities.

What Is It?

Day 5 - Chickenbone Lake to Daisy Farm

From Chickenbone Lake campsites, we hiked long Greenstone Ridge Trail, then down to the shore of Lake Superior though the term down is misleading for every down slope was followed by an upslope almost as long but not quite, resulting in a general trend down that was achieved there bit by bit. Since I was trudging ahead in the lead to set the pathetically slow pace, I deprived my companion of the ability to share in the observation of my first moose. Since it was vastly hugely larger than I imagined such a thing would be, I loudly exclaimed a few words that would have been totally inappropriate in the presence of the Boy Scouts, providing another good reason for our setting out ahead of them. He kindly let me live after I scared the moose away before he could see it, and we moved on. We were rewarded later, when we came to a beautiful pond with rock formations and wild irises and I confidently said with my new found expertise on the species, "This looks like a good place for moose." And yes, there, just yards away, was a giant dark brown hulk munching on something from the depths of the pond. I snapped photos from afar, resting on my worn out feet, while my partner snuck back for a closer look.

Later on the trail, we encountered another first, this time a botanical one. Yellow lady slipper orchids appeared, first singly then in groups. Their brilliant yellow would be enough to make them stand out in the shade under the tree canopy, but their unique shape, with a ballooned pouch under a trio of striped burgundy petals, two of them long narrow and twisted, makes them like nothing else in the plant world. Only the onslaught of mosquitoes kept me from shedding my pack to creep about the soggy ground on my belly to photograph them from every angle. Instead, I snapped a few shots from above and by holding my camera low, and scurried on. Remaining a moving target is the only sure way to keep the tiny biting devils from sucking blood. Just as I was remarking that I had seen the two most amazing things I had ever seen, one from the animal world, and one from the plant world, we came upon the longest boardwalk I had ever seen, longer than I could imagine people thinking wise to build from one board at a time carried from miles away. Along that boardwalk were interesting woody plants that I assumed to be blueberries, making me crave fresh fruit more than ever before, and horsetails and the usual ferns and skunk cabbages, but then, alas, something new and entirely different. The pitcher plants were in flower! Rich deep maroon red down-facing flowers of thick waxy petals over tubular leaves that are carnivorous, in that they trap and dissolve insects. What an truly amazing day! Camp at Daisy Farm is in the woods away from the shore of the 'big' lake, Lake Superior, where the wind was cold but after being hot and sweaty for so many days in row, it was a welcome cold. And it felt good to know that there was just one long day of hiking left, meaning there was a genuinely good probability that I would make it back home alive.

White Freezer Paper Time

I just got wind that the Dickey County Fair is about to begin, and for many years of my childhood and adolescence that meant certain things: A mad scramble to finish the 4-H project record books with paper and pencils and markers and tape and photos spread out all over the kitchen table and meals taken in little patches of it so as not to disturb the ongoing work as my sister and I documented a year of progress on many projects in just a day or two. And early morning through late night long days spent finishing up the last touches on the sewing, the crafts, the dried floral arrangements, the photography album, and various other projects. And last minute preparations for the early morning baking of the foods project. And my personal favorite, the annual covering of the peach crate or cardboard box of similar size with glossy white freezer paper and masking tape. You see, the garden vegetables had to be displayed in a white box, and freezer paper, the kind that was white with a glossy waxy side, was durable and thick enough to make a sturdy display box. It was called freezer paper because butchers and homemakers wrapped meat in it for freezing, in the days before thick plastic bags with zipper seals. Masking tape worked best on the glossy paper, but you had to fold ends in and use loops of tape behind them so that the brown tape was concealed. There were specific rules for these vegetable displays: In a lean year, you needed 3 kinds of vegetables and in a year of abundance, you needed 5 kinds, so there was last minute consulting of the fair booklet to see what the officials would be looking for this year. And for each kind of vegetable, you needed to display a specific number. Maybe 5 string beans, maybe 5 peapods, maybe 5 radishes, maybe 3 tomatoes, maybe 3 carrots, maybe only one muskmelon or one cabbage. So when you chose what from your garden to display, there was some strategy involved, because if you only had 4 good beans, that 5th bad one was going to count heavily against you, so better to go with the carrots that only required 3. And when you gardened with your sister, you had to fill two boxes so that you would show equally well but you did not want to have identical selections that would make it obvious you shared a garden, so there was some strategy to work out there too. Then, before the judging, you had to wander past all the vegetable boxes and assess how yours stood up to the rest, and after judging, you had to see if you got a blue, red, or white ribbon, but especially in the later years, you needed to be casual about it so as not to let on that you cared. Ah, it was a complicated time, but it was the metrics that defined failure or success as a 4-Her for the year, so it was a Pretty Big Deal. And it all represented one more thing too: The end of serious summer when you worked on projects and the beginning of fun summer when you only had to weed the garden if you wanted to work on your tan.

Filtering

The artist is a filter. Never can everything about a place or thing be put down on paper. Even in a photograph, only what is fit within the confines of the image area is shown to the viewer. In this way, the artist edits out what is distracting to show the viewer something important about a place or thing. One photograph or painting might make you see the structure of the building by making you look at it square on and see the symmetry and the specific angles, things you miss by moving around it too quickly or looking from just one side. Another photograph or painting might show you the rusted lock on the door or the spider web in the window, details you might miss in looking at the very large building. A good artist makes you see these things but also makes you realize you are seeing them such that next time you are near a building, you might stop to look at it square on to assess the geometry and you might walk up close to discover the details. It is nice to sell a work of art, but it is nicer still to have someone look at your art and say “I never noticed that before!” That is success!