preserved autumn

after years of doing STILL, i now know to leave a few bits of each season to dry quietly in the corners of unused rooms. the practice serves multiple purposes. i like to see what happens to my favorite specimens once they dry up–often they are even more interesting in this fragile state of decay. the practice is also is a way to put money in the bank for winter days when i am distracted or we get socked with 11 inches of snow.  yup, 11 inches yesterday. and the plow service has not yet come. so i am officially snowed in. i don’t mind. i have an important deadline looming, and money in the bank.

dried red maple leaves from autumn

on dailiness

this is yesterday’s tulip, 24 hours later. similar but totally different. it’s easy to ignore the between-states of nature. to consider that the half-bloomed flower is somehow unfinished, or merely on its way to becoming  itself. but it is itself at every step. this tulip had a one-day season of not quite pulling free from the hood of leaves in which it had incubated, and that was exactly what it was supposed to be during this microseason of its short life.

pink tulip bud opening

a visit to my mom’s

my mom is 86 years old. no one knows what to buy her for holidays any more. so she gets a lot of flowers and plants delivered. recently she got a basket of spring bulbs. the bulbs had not sprouted yet and were still covered with moss, so we didn’t know what was going to come up–hyacinths? daffodils? amaryllis? paperwhites? crocuses? a combination of all of them? one week of joyful anticipation…and pink tulips it is. so today i photographed tulips, while i listened to the weather report forecast 16-22 inches of snow in the next two days.

time has slowed, and sped up

during and after the pandemic, time took on all sorts of new characteristics–it slowed at times to molasses, at others it sped up so fast that a whole year went by in a blink with now memories of events to mark its passing. once again, but this time due to the hyper-focus of looming deadline, time is morphing. days are long, but weeks are short. in 1993, Einstein taught us that time is relative—in other words, the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. i don’t know why everybody makes such as big deal out of Einstein, i could have told ’em all that time was relative.

8 years ago

i’ve been spending a lot of time in my archive while i work on my STILL book. yesterday, i came across this photo from 8 years ago–2015. my son, who is now 19 and at NYU, would have been 11 years old when he made this (still in elementary school). one of the many joys of STILL, was that from the very beginning it became a family project. not because i surreptitiously enlisted my kids to help me get my daily commitment done, but because it was just so much fun. the joy of finding good specimens while out walking, the thrill of making compositions that delighted us, it was all pure play. everyone got into the spirit of it. it is one of the reasons i have been able to continue this crazy project for 11 years uninterrupted. it’s just plain fun.