We are a family of hikers. The four of us pile into the car and drive off into the hills to hang out with each other and explore nature.
When we don’t have time for a full blown hike in the mountains, our kids and I like to connect with each other and with nature in walks through our neighborhood. We pull our Flower Fairies books off the shelves and go out into the world, equipped with poetry.
The photograph shows our daughter on a chilly autumn day bidding farewell to summer with “The Song of the Marigold Fairy.”
I thought I’d take this Photo101: Connect challenge all the way: this is my first post ever that was shot, written, edited, and published entirely from my phone.
One of the biggest challenges of transitioning from stay-at-home mom to full-time-working-mom has been carving out time for errands, time for exercise, and the element I yearn for most: time for creativity. Which, for me, means quiet time. Alone.
I decided to experiment this week by scheduling a work day on Saturday and taking a flex day today. I had a hair appointment at 9 AM – grooming! a first step in starting to figure out this work-life balance thing – and made a long list of errands I’m rarely able to get to anymore during the week: bank, post office, library, kids’ school.
When I saw that the day’s photography challenge was Solitude, I grabbed my camera and added “photos” to my list.
Leaves and tombstones, November, Blacksburg, VA
I was inspired by my photo-genius coworker, Jen Hooks, who blogs at lightcandy: she is not pulling photos from her archives for the Photography 101 course many of us are taking. She is aiming to get behind her lens every day and shoot new work. And with a day off, I wanted to do the same.
The first thing I thought of on this cold, misty November day, when I had the day all to myself, was the cemetery. Is that weird? It called to me with its emptiness, and its silence. Though my days have no noise, my mind feels loud. I feel like I’m rushing all the time – rushing to get the kids’ lunch boxes packed, rushing to throw the dishes in the dishwasher, rushing to get the kids to sports, rushing to take my shower, rushing to “get to work” (down in my basement office).
There’s no rush at the cemetery. It is quiet. It is peaceful. It is slow-paced.
It was exactly the stillness, and the solitude, I needed.
I shot these photos for Photography 101: Solitude, and for Jen Hooks’ Minimalist challenge.
Cloud with rainbow over Gulf of Mexico. Anna Maria Island, FL.
I am a morning person. I love to get up before the world awakes and listen to the quiet.
When we camp, I boil water for coffee on a Coleman stove that pings and hisses, then I sit quietly and watch a leaf fall, and feel the warmth creep over me as the sun rises.
Even better than that, though, is when we vacation on Anna Maria Island on the Gulf coast of Florida. I don’t have to boil water there. I have a coffee pot that does that for me. When we are at the condo, I’m often torn about whether to sleep in or get up early.
But those mornings I do get out of bed early? I bring my mug down to the beach, sit on in the shade of a big pine tree, and sip coffee while I watch clouds grow.
I hated to post a photograph of a cloud yet again, but this photograph, and the memory of the morning I shot it, is my bliss.
I thought I would agonize over what kind of photograph to use for water: should I use the marshes of my Georgia childhood? Or the Gulf waters of our vacation spot on Anna Maria Island? Or maybe the crystal fresh waters of an Appalachian stream, or our trip to Lake Superior when we lived in Minnesota – or maybe the Cascades waterfall that is our children’s favorite hike? I’ve got photographs of those waterfalls from every season – maybe I should go with those.
But despite all the bodies of water I’ve loved in my life, and all the bodies of water I will love when I meet them (geyser pools, Bahamian shores, arctic lakes, glaciers), the image that kept popping into my head when I thought of water was that of giant white cumulus clouds building over the aqua waters of the Gulf of Mexico in summer: the water cycle before my eyes. I can’t get enough of those clouds.
The possiblities are endless for today’s assignment. I had a hard time editing for this one. Photography 101: Water.
I’d love to post a cool street scene of graffiti and show off our urban edge, but the fact is, we are not urban, and we’re certainly not edgy. We live in a quiet Virginia neighborhood where my most frequent interaction with our street is walking our kids to the bus stop in the morning. In winter the wind comes howling down our street off the mountains, and that’s a bummer. But in fall, the sidewalk is littered with crispy leaves and crunchy acorns, and our daughter wears snuggly boots, and the light is perfect and beautiful.
This is my entry for Photography 101: Street. Two days, two photographs – I’m on a roll.
My husband and I courted in the hills of Appalachia. We backpacked in the southern Smokies when I was still a student at the University of Georgia. We took weekend trips to Panthertown Creek in North Carolina, or Chattanooga, Tennessee, and when he and his hiking partner trekked 500 miles from Georgia to Virginia on the Appalachian Trail, I sent him care packages of homemade trail mix, and met him at little towns on the weekends, where we’d stay in B&Bs and eat breakfasts of hot biscuits.
As we got married and grew up, we moved further and further from the green hills and soft forests of our courtship. We moved to the D.C. metro area, where we sat in traffic on the beltway. In four years we never made it to Shenandoah despite a thousand proclamations, “We should head to the mountains this weekend.”
Then we moved to coastal Florida where we sweated it out in the flatlands for eight years. We bought our first house there, and bore our children there. We learned out how to be parents there, and with a seven hour drive just to get out of the state, we lost touch with the mountains, and our younger lives, completely.
When we moved to Minnesota, where we shivered and shoveled through three winters, we had no idea where our lives were taking us, or where we would end up next.
And then.
Then, as my husband’s postdoc drew to an end, and he began applying for faculty positions in Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas, he applied, and interviewed, for a position at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Back in the Appalachians, in the green hills where we met, in the soft forests where we fell in love. Back in the Appalachians where it’s not too hot and it’s not too cold, where it’s emerald green in the summer, blazing copper in the fall; where the world turns bleak in winter, and bursts into blossom in spring.
Back in the Appalachians where we’re raising our children – where we now live. Back in the Appalachians where we’re home.
This is my kickoff post for Photography 101: Home. My ambition is to post a photo a day as part of the course – I’ve got my fingers crossed that I can do it.
Butterfly Mind 