Gravity

When my camera fell out of my jacket pocket onto the beach this summer, I was afraid  it would never work again. I gave a sigh of relief when  I picked it up and snapped a shot, but now two months later, it can't focus.  Sand is mucking up the works.  I found a list of things to try to do to get it to work again, no luck yet.


Here's a shot of the beach.

Yes, I was in New England. 

 I was playing with images of seaweed and stones and studying the ways the water left marks in the sand and looking at the shadows the seaweed cast.

I also spent some time studying the tracks of the shorebirds.  There was plover nest site nearby.

Shortly after I took these shots, I placed the camera in my windbreaker's pocket, and sat on the blanket for a bit.  When I stood the camera skidded out of the slippery nylon and onto the sand.  I took more pictures that day and many days after, but the camera chose to jam today--as I was trying to photograph the crabapple pickles I made (which look like eyeballs sealed in a Mason jar).  They were going to be the starting point of this blog, but it didn't happen.

Luxury of the Bubble

crab apple blossoms

As I was writing yesterday about the Cherry Blossom Pink Bubble, I kept thinking that I was so privileged to be be able to have a bubble at all. I live in a bucolic setting, far enough away from urban centers to shelter me from much of the violence in the world.  I had one reader privately comment on how we as a nation have a big bubble.  Sure, there are urban spots in this country that have higher body counts than some war zones, but those are by far the exception.  We live in a bubble, sheltered by our physical isolation from the rest of the world by two enormous oceans.  Most of the people who slip over our borders on the north and south are looking for a way to feed their families, not for a way to blow us up.

Crab apple

The people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Mali, and the Central African Republic do not have the luxury of a bubble. They face violence regularly, they face bombs and gunfire on their way to buy their groceries or worse, while sleeping.  I just have to keep my kid out of the woods during deer hunting season and face an occasional pan handler working the parking lot of the supermarket, a luxury.

Now it is time to stop peering out through the walls of my bubble and turn inward, the vegetable garden needs water, the seedlings need potting up, weeds need pulling, the mowers need gas and belts, the dishes need washing, the hole for the gooseberry (due within 24 hours) needs digging and the newly opened crab apple blossoms need admiring.