77

So it has become my habit, when we stay at my mom's house, that I cruise for photo opportunities by driving the old back roads between the homeplace and Westminster, the nearest town. Since the early days of this project I have thus been passing a mysterious cinder block chimney, standing alone and utterly out of context among rural fields, smothered in leafy vines. I hadn't stopped before; making an intriguing image of such a severe and specific scene would require being there at the right time of day, in the right light and the right weather, and that never seemed to happen. Those planets finally aligned today when I happened to be passing by on my way home from the YMCA. The vines have turned scarlet and I thought the late afternoon sun would limn these with rich golden light, softening the severe lines of the smokestack. Instead, clouds suddenly blocked the sky and the scene became dramatic and dark. Instead of the tonal study in bright, saturated autumn colors there was this black monolith against a swirling gray sky. I was nonplussed -- this was not at all what I was after, I felt like the light had fled from me.

Then had to laugh. I realized the shift in mood wasn't loss of light, just simply a change in light. The light is still there, still all around -- just coming from a slightly different place. Darkness, it seems, could very well be in the eye of the beholder.

Like the man said, once in awhile you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

76 - Up, up and away

Today was totally stressful. I have this funky biodiesel Jeep Grand Wagoneer that I adore but, like other intriguing entities to which I have in the past misguidedly hitched my existential star, it is unreliable. Twice now I have poured time, work and money into making this relationship work, getting the jeep all fixed up and roadworthy, intending to make this truck my daily driver. My brave companion of the road.

Both times I warmed up slowly, getting acquainted by taking small trips near home, and when doing so it bore the boys and me stylishly and effectively. I began to trust. To believe. But once I was ready to seriously invest in the relationship, take it to the next level, really commit, dammit, well -- both times it took me far from home and then just...died. Twice now it has repaid my financial and (not inconsiderable) emotional investment by leaving me stranded. Literally. And this latest time, well. It was sort of more than I could handle gracefully. Life has been good recently, I am grateful for the quiet upswing in our circumstances. But it's startling and distressing to see how little reserve I've been able to rebuild, how quickly and easily knocked back into crisis and despair I seem to be.

Enter my best friend Heather who showed up to sit with me in my interminable wait for the tow truck driver. What a way to spend your Saturday night, right? She then took me out for hamburgers and french fries and pie and in general fluffed me up and smoothed me down and patted me back into something resembling human form instead of a quivering mass of stress and failure.

So we were on our way to dinner after several hours of Heather calming me down and listening patiently to me obsess and complain during the above-mentioned tow truck waiting period. We were both starving and happily anticipating dinner at Baugher's, a long-time favorite country restaurant for both of us. As we cruised into Westminster I spied an automobile dealership that had vast strings of balloons flying above its car lot, curling away into the evening autumn sky. Knowing I'd already rested heavily upon Heather's good graces this day, I asked humbly if she would mind turning the car around to take me back so I could take some photos. Heather very patiently asked if it had to be now, rather than after dinner, and I said very quietly that by the time we were done eating dinner it would be dark and the opportunity lost. To H's vast credit she did not sigh, at least not out loud, and she took the next U-turn and delivered me to the balloon place.

The chance to make some pictures, to reclaim a positive and generative part of myself after a draining day, was indescribably wonderful. Like hitting the reset button on my life and my sense of self, flipping the switch from failure to fruitful. And I really loved the images that resulted. Up, up and away.

Today's image gratefully dedicated to Heather Joslyn: stalwart, confidante, utter ally.

75

A round-trip drive from our happy new home on the Gunpowder river to Jack's school to Cole's school and then back home again requires crossing either the Gunpowder or one of its major tributaries a total of eight times. September has been an incredibly rainy month, and today featured prolonged heavy downpours falling onto an already completely soaked landscape. The rain had nowhere to go and so roads quickly flooded. We were fended off of several routes home by police cars parked across the intersection, telling us to go another way. The one east-west route remaining open was simply jammed with vehicles who, like the rain, had nowhere else to go. A long story but it ended up being four hours in the saddle for me, almost two hours for the guys. This signpost for route 1 a beacon of hope -- we'd almost made it to a road that could take us to another road that could take us home. Eventually.

74

An evening walk along this incredibly clear stream, full of smooth rounded multicolor stones, and me trying to find some way to photograph them without my own shadow appearing as a reflection in the water. Trying, and failing so many times it became pretty funny -- making pictures of everything but the stones, because I couldn't find a shadowed spot where the water surface allowed a view below, rather than reflecting what was above. The harder I tried, the fewer stones appeared in the frame, and it was quite amusing after awhile. At least to me. But then I don't get out much and spend a lot of time either alone or with my children, whose senses of humor run to using the word "butt" whenever possible, so possibly my standards of humor are pretty low.

Sometimes you get the stones, sometimes you get the sky.

73

OK, so no hay windrows or converging lines in the landscape at Citypaper's Best of Baltimore 2011 party last night. Just the usual crappy techno music and cheap rail liquor, which makes it sound like a good time was not had. When indeed it was.

I was struck by how many people come to this party to pose (as my best friend Heather wryly commented about a young'un writhing enthusiastically on the dance floor, clad in a plaid flannel shirt and glittery tiara: "You don't much see that look outside the Best Of party"). So there were costumes, at the one extreme, and much more subtle posturing everywhere else. Which is why I really liked this image, where the man's face is completely whited out by the dance floor spotlights. Last night it wasn't who you are, it was what you look like.

(Confidential to bowling shirt Bud: um, sorry. I'm not usually that obnoxious, particularly when I haven't even commenced the evening's alcohol intake. Though I do prefer to think of it as "refreshingly direct").

72: the path, taken

So maybe this ongoing theme of pathways is getting tedious for you, the viewer, but for me it seems to have a pretty firm grip on my vision. Yesterday's image was that temporary path imposed on a field by windrows of drying hay, and today's entire image bank turns out to be variations on the pathway motif. I was gathering mushrooms in a city park and, in between recording shots of the species I found, made photos for this project in three very different situations. Looking at them back home now I realize they are all variations on the same visual theme: "found" lines in the landscape, dividing, leading...somewhere. Away. I'm learning that for me, making these pathway images, there has to be a place at the edge of the frame suggesting direction, yet not specifying destination -- open possibility. Horizon. Woods.

(I love the wooden posts or pilings in the upper right of the first image. Barely peeking up beyond the crest of the hill -- someplace to head toward, to wonder about. For this same reason, the third image, water channeling between rocks, ultimately doesn't work for me, too anonymous. It doesn't inspire me to wonder where it's going).

71

Does anything smell sweeter than newly-mown hay, drying in the afternoon sun?

70

Another way this piece of land feeds us: winter pears. Probably Boscs, off an old tree in the abandoned garden. They'll need to sit for a long time, slowly ripening as the weather grows cooler. Winter "keeper" pears don't ripen on the tree -- they need to be plucked green from the branches, gently so as not to bruise, and then put away carefully. To be taken out months from now when their sweetness has blossomed in cold storage, and will be most particularly savored.

69 heartless

Hunting season opened a couple days ago, and I live in the country. Also, I hunt, though so far unsuccessfully in that I have yet to shoot a deer myself. I didn't get this one, though I helped track her blood path into the forest, gut her and then carry her out of the woods and hang her from my back deck.

Maybe it's because what I didn't get to share in was that hunter's high I've read so much about, the primal elation after a successful shot, that I was so moved by the milk from her teats. She's still lactating, which doesn't surprise me -- I've been observing this doe, and her fawn, since moving here a month ago. They spent most afternoons bedded under trees near my office window, or scenically grazing the vast sweep of back lawn. I regard deer primarily as overgrown garden pests and also I love to eat venison, so I am not at all sentimental. But I can't shake the vision of that fawn out there in the night, confused, distressed, wondering where its mama went.

A vision that nonetheless did not prevent me from slicing up the doe's heart and frying it in my largest cast-iron skillet with some onions and pieces of a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom from the same woods. I said a silent thank-you to the deer, for giving its life for my sustenance, and to the forest, for sustaining the wider web around us. And ate.

68

I took this photograph when still reeling from yesterday's near-migraine experience, plus some other personal and emotional turbulence that's been presenting itself for me to deal with and that, I must say, I have just so not been wanting to deal with. As a result I was feeling utterly other -- outside my own body, nearly. Once removed from everything and everyone. I went to the gym for a good long punishing workout just wanting to feel something that wasn't stress, dull rage or the ghostly pain of my recent brush with ye olde skull icepick. But the side effect of suppressing emotions is that you push down everything else too, by necessity (also, I suspect, another side effect is that you get migraines, hello!) and I don't want to live with my emotional rheostat permanently set to "dim".

So I am thinking a lot about new roads right now. Roads I don't want to take but don't see any other way to walk if I'm going to remain honest to my own sense of self and slowly emerging (but I hope stubborn) determination that, hey, the primary people in my life need to treat me with respect and consideration. Because I don't have to keep walking this particular way: there are all kinds of new trails beckoning, intriguing glimpses of possible paths not yet taken.

This one out of the back of the Harvest Fare grocery store parking lot, for instance. I can't begin to see where it leads, and it's kind of grubby -- there's a fair amount of trash littering the hill, and deep rutted wash-outs that would make this one bumpy route to follow. But someone put big rocks into the worst ruts, to create a little impromptu traction, and I could hear music, live music, playing not far away behind the trees...

67

I've been fighting off a migraine headache all day today -- sometimes I'm winning, other times the headache is on top. When it's got me good and gripped I have to lie down in bed, just quietly, as still as possible. As a result I've spent rather a lot of time today gazing at the light fixture above the bed and I became sort of besotted with how each little shade is at its own cockamamie angle. Maybe I ought to do something about that. Like to decide to simply find it charming, and leave it alone. That's my current tactic, anyway.

This could all just be the headache talking.

66

Invited to friends' for dinner. Took endless shots of the pear tree in their front yard, leaves gone but branches loaded down with fruit. I found it deeply compelling, visually -- it reminded me of a famous building I can't quite summon to memory, someplace I've been but can't remember where. The lobby has these fantastic cascading lighted globes, all different sizes hanging at all different heights and levels. The pears on this tree struck me that way, and I could not begin to get an image that captured the effect. The harder I tried the further away I got, til I gave up and wandered into the back yard where these deer skulls are set out for sun bleaching. Just one shot, but I like the lines, and I can look at it without feeling frustrated. It's a grab shot that has everything the other shots I struggled with could not achieve: simple, yet dynamic, lines that flow pleasingly. Damn pears. They didn't even taste good.

65 Riverine

One of the last summer days we'll spend on the river, I'm afraid. A couple nights from now temps are predicted in the 40s. Today, though, it was in the upper 80s, humid, strong sun warm on our bodies. And the boys on a newly discovered rope swing, learning how to be brave and let go now- no, now- over the swirling waters. You never swim in the same river twice, but how I wish you could somehow feel the sun on your face and smell the rich riverine scent of the Gunpowder at this particular elbow, with the rocks and the swing and the boys and me grabbing hold of summer one last time. Wish you were here.

64

Another look at the moon, wonderfully full this evening.  Looks like the sun, maybe, but isnt.

63 -- no fear. know fear.

There is no quit in Cole, my rambunctious youngest. Today he found himself rather higher up the burr oak tree in my mom's front yard than he has ever before managed to go. He hung out there awhile, too stubborn to admit that he didn't know how to climb back down again. I was playing out in the yard with him and his brother and some other neighborhood kids, and would check in with him every now and then -- "How you doing up there, buddy?" "Good."

After awhile, though, the sun started going down and the other kids were getting called home to supper. A small voice drifted down from the treetop: "Mama? I think I forgot how to get back to the ground..."

day 62

I love Cole's hands, moving in the water, blurred, elongated. We were at our favorite spot along the Gunpowder river. He only did this for a split second, bent over, rowing his hands through the stream, testing the chilly waters. I moved in for a closer shot to frame more tightly on the interplay of his hands and the water -- but the moment was gone and so was he, pushing his body out into the current. So we beat on.

day 61 - lucky star

Cole calls this illuminated paper star "our family's lucky home star." It hung in the front window of our previous house, and one of the first things I did upon moving into our sweet wonderful new cottage was hang it anew in the biggest window. On this night Cole climbed up onto the windowsill and when I asked what he was doing he said, "Just looking at our star and the moon," and he pointed out the window to the waxing gibbous moon just then climbing above the tree line. My stars have realigned themselves, I do believe -- truly, I feel lucky these days. Lucky to have this house, these boys, this life.

These thoughts, plus the autumnal nip in the air and the realization that we missed the state fair this past weekend, brought to mind a passage from Garrison Keillor's book of essays, "Leaving Home":

“I went up in the Ferris wheel for a last ride before being thrown into seventh grade. It went up into the stars and fell back to earth and rose again, and I had a magnificent vision, or think I did, though it’s hard to remember if it was that year with the chocolate cake or the next one with the pigs getting loose. The Ferris wheel is the same year after year. it’s like all one ride to me: we go up and I think of people I knew who are dead and I smell fall in the air, manure, corn dogs, and we drop down into blazing light and blaring music. Every summer I’m a little bigger, but riding the Ferris wheel, I feel the same as ever, I feel eternal. The combination of cotton candy, corn dogs, diesel smoke, and sawdust, in a hot dark summer night, it never changes, not an inch. The wheel carries us up high, high, high, and stops, and we sit swaying, creaking, in the dark, on the verge of death. You can see death from here. The wind blows from the northwest, from the farm school in Saint Anthony Park, a chilly wind with traces of pigs and sheep in it. This is my vision: little kids holding on to their daddy’s hand, and he is me. He looks down on them with love and buys them another corn dog. They are worried they will lose him, they hang on to his leg with one hand, eat with the other. This vision is unbearably wonderful. Then the wheel brings me down to the ground. We get off and other people get on. Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”

I adore this image. I find it beyond lovely, so sweetly, achingly beautiful that it nearly breaks my heart with a sense of joy, of privilege, for having had this moment. Having been there to take this photo.

day 60 - back in the saddle

So with today's image I have rededicated myself to the proposition of making a meaningful image each day, really putting thought and effort into producing a picture that I would want to look at any time, in any circumstance. Not just a placeholder, a because-I-have-to picture, but an image that gives visual voice to something my eyes and brain have to say. And today they're saying that if I'm back in the saddle perhaps it is on the back of a dinosaur. Because this series of stepping stones reminds me of the fossilized vertebrae of some long lost sauropod, half-buried in the earth.

day 59

Not a compelling image, aesthetically, but a significant one for me personally: Here is my beloved 1991 Jeep Grand Wagoneer (dig the classic woody side panels!) being loaded onto a tow truck, en route to a local garage and eventually its new owner. I have been forced, by recent unfortunate personal economic circumstances, to sell the Jeep, which was customized with a diesel engine to run biodiesel or WVO. Unfortunately, as a highly customized vehicle, it's had some mechanical issues that I lack the skills to fix myself and the money to pay anyone else to deal with for me. So I sell the fun and funky, but unreliable, car I adore and keep the dull but eminently practical Honda minivan, which has the sterling quality of starting each and every time I turn its key. Sigh. Some days impersonating a responsible adult is even less fun than usual.

day 58 - mea culpa

Perhaps it was inevitable, but the day did come when I didn't take a photo. Just didn't. Early on this day making my picture was very much on my radar, I was watching for possible photo ops from behind the wheel as I dashed around on checking off a seemingly endless list of errands between school drop offs and pick ups. But I never found anything compelling, and then there was homework to supervise and dinner to cook and an empty shoebox to find for Cole to take to school the next day and next thing you know it's bedtime. I woke up somewhere close to, but still before, midnight, realized I hadn't taken a photo for the day...and decided I just wasn't going to get up again. I was bone tired, snuggled up warm and happy with my children, and my commitment to this project simply could not carry enough weight to overcome my eyelids' drift back closed. So. No photo today. It's not that I forgot. It's just that I didn't do it. Maybe I should feel more badly about this than I do, which is pretty much not at all. There were some really bad days recently, after all, when I still managed to make a photo, and today was definitely not bad. But all you can do is go forward, which I am, and I've decided to give myself this one-time pass and to make up for my lapse I am going to tack a makeup day onto the end of this project. So instead of July 9th, 2012, being the final day of my 365 project, now July 10th, 2012 will be the final day of my *366* project.

day 57

A rainy walk in the woods, and we found two box turtles hanging out together. Um, sorry if we, you know, interrupted anything there, turtles. But we enjoyed meeting you.

day 56

Been a busy, busy bunch of days, and we've been having let's just call them issues with our internet service. As in, often there isn't any, and Comcast seems unable to figure out why or do anything about it. But I keep taking pictures. Here's a sweet one of Jack taking an inaugural ride on our new backyard tire swing.

day 55

Driving home from Dundalk after spending an evening with my cousin Val and his family on their boat, the Echo Sound. I already had a photo of the day, a safe shot easily made earlier in the day without much feeling. On our way down Merritt Boulevard I spotted this parking lot outside a grocery store closing for the evening, the lone stranded shopping cart, and it tweaked my eye. It was late (for us, anyway) and everyone was tired so I nearly kept on going but, for the first time in awhile, the impetus to make a particular picture presented itself. I pulled into the lot, told the boys what I was doing, and hopped out to take the photo -- just as an employee started trucking over to retrieve the cart. I managed one shot, not at all the shot I would have liked to have worked into over a series of exposures, but for today's photo I think the significance of stopping outweighs any pictorial merits.

I've said this to several people in the past few days, but I feel like I'm in recovery from some long malady. I'm still so fragile and tired and easily depleted, but at the same time feel more like myself than I have in some time. It's the sensation of having been rather seriously ill for awhile, and only when you finally begin getting better, finally start feeling once more like at least a pale semblance of your normal self, do you realize how under the weather you actually were.

day 54

We have had a few days now of doing blissful nothing. Hanging around our new house, figuring out how to live here happily. Summer is my favorite season, in part for the opportunity of long lazy days of doing not very much in particular, but this was a hectic one, and here it is over already.

So it feels good to just be here with a long holiday weekend stretching out ahead. Friday Jack had a half day of school, Coley stole one last day of summer vacation. We picked up Jack at noon, came home, had some macaroni, and then chilled all afternoon. Jack played Lego computer games, Cole and I lounged in bed and read books. Naps happened. Still so much to do, boxes to be unpacked, rooms arranged, purchases made. And it will all get done. Just not right now.

day 53