on turning

My friend Heather, in her Boston apartment earlier this year.

And Joel Meyorwitz, answering the question: What do you look for in a photograph?

"It's a merger of what's inside your head and what's outside your eyes, and finding a way to synthesize that experience—because what's inside your head isn't something that you have predetermined you want to have. It's a notion of what's satisfying, what fills you up. I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it—stones and buildings and trees and air—but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up a frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there. It's full because you're there, because you carried a lifetime of impulses with you that direct you toward the clear sky behind you. You don't know why, but you turn to it."

[Honeywell Pentax, 35mm]

ten good things, & other things

01. a sweet, sweet weekend with kira, and a reminder of how easy a friendship can be—what a rare gift.

02. roasted tomato soup and beet pesto and spring minestrone and all the glories of summer produce.

03. bright blue hydrangeas from the market, now on our table.

04. postcards, letters, and packages in the mail. new bra, new books, chicory root to make this!

05. scoring a $70 book on fra angelico for $17 at the used bookstore downtown.

06. a job that I love and an employer who offers constant encouragement. also a rare gift.

07. summer travel plans: cincinnati! charlottesville! chicago! denver! possibly maine!

08. returning to old journals and memories from last summer at this time: in iceland, with derek.

09. all the friends who have traveled to visit us, drank coffee on our front porch, slept on our air mattress, and ate dinner on the kitchen floor with us.

10. this month of june, which is always a good month.

Lately, also:

Listening all day long to Told Slant's Going By. 

I am trying to find words for the movement from dusk to darkness in the summertime, how slow it is, until that last moment of light which flickers out suddenly like a flame. It's like this: the sun holds on to the day, as if they were attached by a string stretched taught and long into the evening, the tension growing before snapping into the darkness of night, only the constancy of the fireflies carrying us across the divide. That last moment of light is anything but slow: it is sharp, quick, easy to miss. I want to spend this summer waiting for that snap.

[our tomatoes and peppers, much larger now! honeywell pentax, 35mm]