Photography – Page 3

52 Photos ~ Criss Cross

Nest

I walked out, and the nest
was already there by the step. Woven basket
of a saint
sent back to life as a bird
who proceeded to make
a mess of things. Wind
right through it, and any eggs
long vanished. But in my hand it was
intricate pleasure, even the thorny reeds
softened in the weave. And the fading
leaf mold, hardly
itself anymore, merely a trick
of light, if light
can be tricked. Deep in a life
is another life. I walked out, the nest
already by the step.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Fire

To approach the beehive, beekeepers light a smoker.

A bee smoker is a little lidded can with a built-in bellows. You start with a piece of crumpled newspaper, light it, and drop it to the bottom of the smoker, then use the bellows to puff puff puff until you get some good licking flames, and then you add the fuel (dried pine needles, dried grass, wood shavings, fuel pellets, what have you), keep puffing and, in minutes (in theory), you get a strong plume of cool-to-the-touch smoke.

In fact, this process takes some practice. It’s easy to get a flame, and then it’s easy to kill the flame. You can get hot smoke and sparks fairly easily, too. But getting the cool, thick, lasting smoke is the trick and we’re finally getting the knack of it. Almost.

When you’ve got consistent smoke, you don the bee suits and head to the hive. Puff the hive entrance where the guard bees are keeping watch, let the smoke seep in. You and the bees are quieting. There’s smoke in the air and it’s the sunny part of the day.

Let the smoke swirl. Lift the lid of the hive. Spread the smoke around the lid, down into the frames. Thousands of bees, busy but calm, focused on their jobs.

And we just can’t look away.

Every time we visit the hive I want more time. There are so many details to absorb, beyond merely tending to the needs of the hive (refilling sugar syrup feeders, removing extraneous comb, checking for eggs and larvae).

Every time we visit the hive we come back with more questions. For instance, do bees sleep? Yes, we read, they do. In fact, you might come across a bee napping in a flower. Imagine that.

We’ve yet to see the queen. Did I tell you we named her Elspeth? She’s marked with a green dot so we have a prayer of seeing her, but so far she’s been hidden, doing her work, surrounded by her attendants.

We check the hive only every three to five days so as not to disturb them too much. And we need to wait for the weather to cooperate; it’s no good to open the hive on a blustery, rainy day.

On hive-check days, I go to bed with the smell of smoke in my hair. The same as on a camping day, or after an evening by the fire pit, roasting marshmallows, watching for meteors, and musing about the dreams of bees.

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This is my first photo in the new series of 52, running from May 2014 to May 2015. If you’re interested in joining (it’s never too late!), check out the 52 Photos Project blog.

These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

Wordless Wednesday ~ The Evening Grosbeak report

52 Photos – Petals

First things first.

The snow has melted. The geese are honking their way northward. Last night M saw bats, and we heard the songs of foreign birds, traveling through, making joyful trilling melodies we’d never heard before in our little corner of Vermont. The river is riding high on its banks, and with today’s steady rain it might decide to creep over the ledge to see what it’s like to spread out over the fields. I haven’t heard a spring peeper yet, but the vernal ponds are thawed and shimmering. It’s only a matter of moments.

I hear tell of people in other places who’ve seen crocuses and other early bulbs; not just their green pointy fingers thrown up through the soil, but actual blooms, blossoms, petals.

Not here. Not yet.

(Thank goodness, by the way, for trucks and airplanes that transport roses with flame-tipped petals from southern hot houses to the the mud-bound north.)

But yesterday we brought the hibernating garden hose out of the basement, attached it to the the outdoor spigot, and used it to fill the goats’ water tank. If that’s not a sign of spring, I don’t know what is.

This long, lingering winter’s left me fairly brittle. Slow to thaw. But this week I’m starting to unclench just a little, to unfurl. I’m not ready to bloom yet, but I felt the warm sun on my head yesterday, and I felt a softening where the ice has held fast.

The baby apple and pear trees, which were up to their throats in snow just two weeks ago, are covered with brown buds, potential blossoms, but there’s no sign yet of their opening (I check every day). Fairly soon, though, everything will be bursting into spring and we’ll be mowing the lawn and slapping at mosquitoes.

For my birthday this year, M & H gave me a beehive. And 10,000 bees and their queen. We bring the bees home on Saturday. Listen up, buds! You’d better start blooming. We’ve got some pollen and nectar to gather!

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These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ A day in my life

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52 Photos – A present someone gave me

We all have our quirks, our strange desires, our unexplainable fixations.

Maybe yours include miniature donkeys, red race cars, old marbles, antique spoons, smooth sticks, felted bowls, comic books, spools.

One of mine is yaks. Don’t ask me why. They just fascinate me.

For a small while I entertained the fantasy of adding a yak to our goat pen (imagine the goats’ outcry at that!).

My family—ever encouraging, ever thoughtful, ever patient—somehow found me a real yak bell. Huge and resonant, bearing the dents and rust of age and use.

Sometimes, when the house is too quiet and lonely and my mind is making too much noise, I’ll ring the bell (startle the dog), and imagine myself among those great shaggy beasts, heads down, grazing the grasses and sedges of some high plateau in Tibet. Unperturbed, steadfast, shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of our herd.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Where I would take you

Last week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project was to take a picture of a place I would show you in my town.

We have a small town. There’s a combination post office/village store/gas station. The store doesn’t stock much, but if you need a bag of chips, or a dusty can of soup, or a dozen eggs, or the newspaper, you can get it there.

There’s a town hall. A town garage. A community center. Several schools. Several churches. Several cemeteries.

There’s a beautiful nursery where we buy our apple trees and blueberry bushes and other perennials.

There are many farms. Many trees (the maples are tapped for sap this time of year).

We have two covered bridges.

We have a dam.

One cafe.

A bank.

A river.

With two branches.

Which is where I absolutely would take you.

The west branch of the Ompomanoosuc river runs through the valley behind our house. Most of the year, H can hear the river’s waterfall from her bedroom window. Right now the river’s run is mostly locked up in ice and snow and the waterfall is just a ripple.

In the summer, we go to one of the swimming holes, and pilfer the day. We hike up the river (water up to our knees) and play in the riffles. We sun on the rocks like sleepy seals.

The picture above was taken last week, before the vernal equinox. Now that it’s spring, the difference is that there are six more inches of snow on that layer.

I’ll tell you what.

I’ll take you to the river, but let’s wait until July. We’ll pack a picnic of a sourdough loaf, a round of bloomy goat cheese, and quart of sweet strawberries. And a thermos of ice-cold lemonade and a jug of beer. We’ll wear our sunglasses and sunscreen and sunhats and moan with our heat-induced laziness. And we’ll try our darndest to remember what winter felt like.

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52 Photos ~ How I start my day

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These photos are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Where people gather

I think we can all agree that this winter has been long by any measure.

Even this week, when the days are noticeably elongated by extra minutes of daylight, the overnight temperatures keep plunging down below -10º F. The alternating daytime sunshine followed by nighttime freezes has glazed the snow with a sparkling layer that fractures with each step. It makes for beautiful but tiring walking.

Because I work at home, I spend too many hours alone in this house and on the trails and hills surrounding it. It’s beautiful. I love this place. But after a winter like we’ve all had, I’m antsy. I need to see people and buildings. I need to eat food that I didn’t cook. I need to buy things that I don’t really need. I need a different view out the window. I need not to see the piles of books and waiting projects.

Long days. Cabin fever days. Seen-enough-of-the-shovel-and-the-wood-pile days.

Probably not coincidentally, New England schools take a one-week break in February. M had to work, but H and I skeddadled to Boston, where my sister took us in and offered us her city.

We went to the most touristy of Boston spots, Quincy Market, where we grazed up and down the central hall of the food building and reminisced about our school days when we’d be set free early once a month from classes and we’d take the bus into town with our friends and gorge on pizza and french fries and then go window shopping at the most ridiculous single-themed tiny shops (one that sold nothing but things with hearts, another that sold only purple objects).

These days, Quincy Market is rather more like a mall, populated with larger chain stores (thankfully, the pizza place is still there). Even so, we enjoyed our hours among the school groups and the tourists, and the cute couple with matching stocking caps, and the new parents pushing baby carriages, and the teenagers giggling next to the candy shop, and the guy playing piano in the central atrium for an hour without stopping.

Our first night in town, we went to play pool. The music was loud, the food was mediocre, but we were there for the pool and the tables were clean and smooth. None of our group is any good at all, but oh did we have fun. We took turns walking around the table, lining up our shots, sinking some, but missing more often, trying out ridiculous angles, and laughing a lot. We got better as the night wore on, and then we got worse as we got tired.

I didn’t think about snow or ice or firewood or the oil tank once.

We’re home again and it’s as bitter as ever. I swear if it’s like this in April I’ll buy a plane ticket to Mexico. You’ll find me there with a pile of books, a plate of tacos, a tall cool drink, and no memory of winter.

Today when I went out the snow was so white, the sky so blue, the sunlight so bright that it was blinding (you know that kind of day when you come back inside and everything looks pink? that kind of day). The river was still frozen over. The dog skittered out onto the ice; he’s either braver than I am or just clueless.

I imagined a giant cue stick in my hand, my bending low over the table of ice, shooting my right arm forward with force, the slam of spring against winter, breaking it, scattering it, and sinking it into the corner pocket.

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