Tag Archives: photography

(Extra)ordinary Construction Worker

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I was having some windows installed in my home last week, and one of the construction crew members, while walking through my living room, stopped and pointed to the wall behind me.

“What’s that?” he asked in a way that made me wonder if someone had perhaps snuck in a boar’s head and mounted it on my unsuspecting wall. I turned to look. Oh, that.

“It’s a dulcimer,” I told him, and proceeded to answer his questions about the instrument. Where it originated, what type of music one played on it, etc.

“Wow!” He continued to stare at it with that boar’s-head-on-the-wall type of fascination. “That’s a real conversation piece!”

This week’s Daily Press photo challenge asks, “What’s mundane yet meaningful to you? What’s a beautiful everyday thing?”

I guess my dulcimer would fall into that category. I think it’s beautiful. It does carry special meaning for me. And yet – to me – it has become rather “mundane.” I see it hanging on my wall each day. I dust it occasionally (okay, rarely). And very rarely, I take it down and actually try to play the darn thing.

It’s interesting to think about how the term “mundane” is such a personal concept. It’s quite possible that I could walk into that construction worker’s home and see a boar’s head hanging on his wall. My reaction would likely be, “What’s that?” and he would reply, “Oh, that’s Reggie. Or what’s left of the little tyke. He was one helluva pig.”

So if you’re looking through the other entries to the photo challenge and you come across a picture of a boar’s head mounted on a wall, it’s probably a photo of Reggie that my construction worker posted on his blog.

I just hope my construction worker is as good at installing windows as he is at photography, blogging, taming wild boars, and taxidermy.

Wow! He’s a busy guy! I guess it’s no wonder he never found time to take up the dulcimer.

Weekly Photo Challenge: (Extra)ordinary

Finding Happy

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The theme for this week’s Daily Post photo challenge is “happy place,” and the question is “where do you go to get your groove back?”

I don’t so much have a “happy place,” as I do a “contentment place.” When life gets a bit too chaotic, here are three of my “retreats”:

Walks with my buddy.
walks

Getting lost in creativity.
studio

Nature
oceanside

I actually have many happy places. In fact, I’m in one right now. I call it “home.”

Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy Place

Boundaries of the Dead

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Low fences of concrete and iron
in varying degrees of sturdiness or collapse,
delineate gravesites and family plots
of a long-established and
long-neglected pioneer cemetery.

Whether they are meant to keep the living out,
or the spirits in, I’m not sure.
They seem inadequate for either task.

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As a child I wandered this place of the dead,
on Sundays, after I had escaped the
torturously long church service,
and before my parents finished
drinking burnt coffee and eating stale cookies
and were finally ready to take me home.

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Ever careful to avoid the mounds and divots
that belied a coffin underneath,
my imagination jumped at the chance
to interpret any slight cold breeze
that made the hanging moss sway, and
any crooked dead branch that
pointed at me like a bony accusatory finger,
as some displaced spirit,
disgruntled at my presence there.

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Was it disrespectful to enter the gates
of those family plots since I did not
belong to the family?
Was I overstepping the boundaries
of the long-departed when I
stepped over the fences
that parceled out their final resting places?

I guess I won’t find out the rules
for graveyard boundary etiquette
until I depart to my own final resting place.

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If you come to my gravesite
to pay your respects,
look for a bony tree-branch finger
beckoning you to draw near,
and wait for that cold breath of air to
whisper in your ear.
I will give you the answers
about the boundaries of the dead.
And then I will cross that final boundary,
where long-winded sermons,
burnt coffee, and stale cookies
can haunt me no more.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Boundaries

Let’s Go Literal

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I am literally challenged by this week’s Daily Press photo challenge. I am challenged by literalness.

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I grow uncomfortable around ambiguous phrases or terms, like questions that begin with “How do you like…” As in “How do you like your job?”

What is the actual question here? Is it like the phrase “How do you take your coffee?” I like my coffee with cream and sugar. I like my job with very little supervision and an extremely high salary. I seem to drink a lot of black coffee. Guess we don’t always get how we like.

But maybe the question simply means “Do you like your job?” In which case, the answer might be “yes” or “no.” But when “how” is tacked on at the beginning of the question, single-syllabic answers seem no longer appropriate.

In a question format, “how” becomes an adverb (I think; don’t quote me on that), which suddenly makes it all complicated with the need for nouns and adjectives and such.

“How do you like your job?”
“Yes.”
It just doesn’t work that way.

The Daily Post’s photo challenge theme this week is Grid. “We often superimpose a mental grid over things we photograph to help with composition,” the post begins. “This week, let’s go literal.” Michelle the Daily Post person suggests, “This week, let’s take the humble grid out of the shadows, and make it the star.”

Go literal? Suddenly I am compulsively pulling up dictionary.com to look up the literal meaning of “grid.” And since a “grid” is defined as a “grating,” I have to look up “grating,” as well.

This whole thing is, indeed, grating. On my nerves. Guess I’ll have to just grid and bear it. (Ahhhh, she breaks under pressure…)

Definition of “grating” and hence, by inference, also the definition of “grid” ~

a framework of parallel or crossed bars, used as a partition, guard, cover, or the like.*

*Emphasis mine. Mostly because I’ve always wanted to say “Emphasis mine.” **

** And also because I like to use asterisks.

After all this grate research, I have determined that my photos this week are in fact literal depictions of “or the like.”

How do you like them?

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