good and evil

i can’t help but be responsible. it’s how i’m wired. i don’t carry credit card balances, and i always pay my bills, and i’m a faithful friend and spouse. but i can’t be only well-behaved. i need a vice or two to comfort myself. a stepping stone path through life. a little bit of angel. followed by a little bit of devil.

black and white beach rocks (lake superior and mediterranean sea)

shells

these are not technically eggs, they are shells. still themselves but hollowed out. my feelings about the holidays fluctuate from year to year. i try my best to keep them meaningful, but some years they fill me up and some years they hollow me out. this year, i’m feeling a little emptier than usual. our daughter is home from college with a sparklingly energetic boyfriend which has made home life happy and full of love and energy. but the big gatherings have taken more from me than they’ve given for some reason this year. on the other hand, part of what it means to reach your fifties is understanding that nothing stays the same. next year or the year after, i’m guessing, will be a peak to this year’s trough. i’m ready either way.

collection of pale colored eggs: chicken, pheasant, partridge

ghosting

i just learned the term ghosting recently. it’s what happens when you have a text relationship with someone and then suddenly they stop texting and disappear. it’s a new part of relationships that i’m glad i don’t have to deal with. all that uncertainty and all those unanswered questions. on the other hand. about this time of year, i start getting the urge to do some ghosting myself. just sort of drifting off in to a creative corner somewhere, where no one can find me for a while.

snow drift

context

with a husband who’s a food writer, the subject of taste, and how it changes with context, comes up fairly frequently. i have an autoimmune syndrome that makes my mouth very dry and i’m sure as a result that i taste things differently from him, and from most others. how then do you decide what tastes “good” or “right” if everyone is tasting something different? this teasel is another example of the power of context. this was my first still blog subject, in france, against a white background, at a time when i was taking prospective test shots to decide whether this idea would even work. so even though i know wild teasel is an invasive pest in parts of california, i always see its prickly, arthropod shape as something to love like family, or like that ugly first dog with a snaggletooth underbite whom no dog since has ever really replaced.

wild teasel comb (dipsacus)

sidelight

so of course, now that i have decided to switch back to a white background, i am seeing all the things i love about black. like the veiny details of this hydrangea flower, that are amplified by the side lighting that works so well against a black background. it’s like i just decided for sure to break up with my high school boyfriend, and now he’s driving away and i’m so, so sad.

lacecap hydrangea in winter