Here's My Latest...

Harry and Jane Before the Storm
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The barn, protected by its lightning rods, awaits them; the corn, not yet mid-sized, will have to withstand the force of the wind-blown rain. Before going inside, the farmer will check the generator to be sure it's ready to take over if power is knocked out. With some luck, tomorrow the sun will rise on a farm still anticipating a good crop and a prosperous season.
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Where's Wizard??

The demands of the season are keeping me away from the keyboard lately. The garden is almost all planted, but then comes the weeding. I snap a few pictures of especially pretty flowers, but even photography is on the back burner right now. A pasture fence needs mending; the garden fence needs some electricity to it. Son, daughter, grandson and I all celebrate birthdays within one month's time, and at the moment, two out of our (formerly) three vehicles are out for the count. And then there's the pinched nerve in my back. You can get NOTHING done while lying flat on the floor.

I need more time!!!!!!!

In lieu of a "better" post, here is a little flying critter I've often tried to capture on "film" and - until recently - never quite got in focus: the Hawk Moth (also called a Hummingbird Moth), here visiting a flower garden.

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And a "flower among the flowers" at Upper Canada Village:

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Hope all of you are well. I'll get back to visiting you soon.

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Time Travel

I went back to 1867 yesterday, just in time for sheep-shearing.* ...The sheep were docile and cooperative as the clippers gradually removed their thick woolen burden.

At the other end of the village, a woman worked at washing the fleece (a job more likely done by men in 1867).



Before carding, the washed wool was placed outdoors to dry.



Clean, dry, and gently twisted into coarse strands of about 2" diameter, the first shearing harvest was already being spun into woolen thread. It will be woven into cloth for clothing and blankets for the winter.



Here's looking at ewe!



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* Upper Canada Village is a living history park in eastern Ontario, created from collected buildings and artifacts that would have been flooded when the St. Lawrence Seaway was built.

We Got Game!

As folks who visit my blog regularly know, I have a friend who is a Shaman. She would correct me to say that she's an Assistant Shaman or a Shaman in Training or some such Lesser Shaman (maybe like the Least Flycatcher: every bit as wonderful as, say, the Acadian Flycatcher, but just living a bit farther north).

Every day, Shaman emails three or four new poems to her friends. My husband, being her occasional racketball partner, was on the receiving list, and so it was that I happened to read a couple of them. I was hooked. There, in beautiful words, were many of the same things I was photographing. I emailed her a photo that paired wonderfully with one of her poems and asked to be put on her mailing list. That was the start of it.

After a few weeks, I put up a blog called Shaman and Wizard and began publishing her poems and adding photos to illustrate some of them. For a while we kept it quiet and private, although I was secretly eager for the world to see our creations. Eventually she agreed to share.

Often a poem sends me out in search of the right picture; sometimes I'll send her a photo and wait for the almost inevitable poetic response. Sometimes things just get plain funny, as in the following exchange. It started when I posted this photo of one of Shaman's concrete statues (among other things, she's a sculptor). For me, it was a good exercise in learning some photo editing tricks.
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...................................Becky Atop Whiteface at Sunset

Whiteface Mountain is near Lake Placid. There is a road that winds up to its summit (which is rocky and bare and commands a magnificent view of that part of the Adirondacks), so most people around here are familiar with it.

I didn't have to wait too long... a couple of days after posting that photo on the Sha-Wiz site, this poem arrived in my Inbox:

Whiteface Naked

I didn’t climb naked
I really didn’t,
it was the hot sun,
the dizzying heights,
distant views,
my then love near,
yes, I took off my clothes,
the picture sold
by him
to some blog for little
money and all
my dignity.
But I do not regret
the moment
when the sun and her colors
stroked
me
as he never could.

By Becky Harblin May 27, 2007

It struck me so funny that I just had to share it with you. I hope you'll check out some of her other writing on the Shaman and Wizard site. You'll find a few of my photographs there too.

A Stroll in the Park

Here's a view across the village green. After my truck was towed (see previous post), I hoofed it here to wait for a ride home.

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The next photograph should be clicked on. It takes on the quality of an impressionist painting when enlarged.

The metal of the fountain (possibly copper?) is a dark gray but reflects the blue of the pool below it.





I was not alone in my enjoyment of the fountain on this hot afternoon.






And in a small garden nearby is this message:




...a dream for most of us, a reality in this small village park.

On this Memorial Day weekend, it seems to me that the most meaningful ceremony in remembrance of the dead of wars past and present would be the this: the celebration of a world at peace.
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My Lucky Day

............................... Bell's Garage in Earlier Days *

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If you’ve ever been in an accident, you know the sound: the smashing crunch of metal on metal. The lucky ones among us get out of the car upset but not hurt, and then forever hold that sound in memory. For me it’s been three slight fender-benders spaced over about 45 years of driving.

Lately I’ve had a reoccurring fear of that crunching sound that is somehow unexpectedly stimulated while I’m driving, perhaps caused by the sudden realization that I’m day-dreaming or not focused sharply enough on the activity at hand. I shudder as my eyes open wider and quickly look out for the imagined other vehicle. I wince in expectation of the smashing crunch. So far it hasn’t happened, and I’m left wondering why this strange fear is asserting itself. My experiences being minor collisions, I wonder how people who have had really serious wrecks react to it.

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Maybe my imaginings are being sparked by an incident that happened about a year ago. As I loaded my groceries into the back seat, I heard that unmistakable sound as three cars tangled up in a – fortunately – low speed wreck in the entry to the shopping center lot. No one was hurt, and so it was apparently just another case for the insurance companies and local body shop folks to wrangle over. I can think of no other possible trigger for my current paranoia.

Today I drove my old pick-up truck to town, planning to pick up some lumber and saw-horses from my son-in-law, a chair I’d bought, groceries and garden supplies. My to-do list was long and involved a number of places on all sides of the village we call “town". It was a stop and go day.

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By early afternoon I’d crossed off several things on my list. Taking the lane behind the Main St. buildings, I swung into the local fast-food restaurant for a bathroom stop, stepped on the brakes, and didn’t stop. The pedal went to the floor, but the truck maintained every bit of its speed. I saw a vacant parking spot and aimed for it, bouncing backward when the tires hit the concrete curb that defines the lot’s perimeter.

I sat there in my truck. I thought of the people I’d stopped for in crosswalks that morning, of the car I waited behind at the red light, of the trip a few days earlier carrying a full load of shredded bark mulch out the hilly back roads to my house. And then I went inside to tell the restaurant owner that my truck might be in her lot for a while.

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There are two garages within walking distance of downtown, so I bought a bottle of water and hit the sidewalks. Tonight my truck sits at Bell’s Riverside Garage and I sit at home, thankful that my brakes failed at probably the best possible time and place, thankful that the only consequences are towing and repair bills. I guess it was my lucky day.

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* As I waited for the wrecker to deliver my truck, I noticed this framed photo of the garage and snapped a copy of it.

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Wistful

Prologue:

Robin left a comment to my blog about becoming a photographer that she felt there was something “wistful” about the piece. She was correct, but not for the reasons she may have suspected. You see, that was to be my swan song, my exit from Bloggerville. I had run into a wall. The passion I had felt for writing seemed to have written itself out or maybe been shoved aside by the season’s outdoor activities. I would take a break, possibly a long break. But then a strange thing happened. Writing “Photography” stirred up the creative juices again, and suddenly I wanted to write some more. Today's entry is titled “Wistful” because of Robin's comment, but you will find there is nothing wistful about it. (Thanks, Robin).

This three-year stretch of time, though significant, was just one part of the path that ultimately led me home.

“Have you been to that new home shop in The Commons?”

“Dan and I just bought a king Beautyrest, and we adore it.”

“Don’t you just love this dip mix?”

“You want the side-by-side Frigidaire. It’s just so much easier.”

“Who did you get to decorate?”

"I just let Jim deal with the lawn. I have enough to do keeping the house neat."


When I think back to that time, those office cocktail parties remember like a Robert Altman movie where you catch bits and snippets of conversations, getting the suggestion of substance without ever really experiencing it. Other times I remember them in the clear focus of Woody Allen when he totally mis-fits at a WASP dinner party. In both cases, those years seem like they were lived on another planet in a galaxy far, far away.

Beginning in the summer of 1968, I was an IBM salesman's wife. I bought the right things (or at least the ones that we could afford), mimicked suburban dress, and lived in a new split-level house. I've always been a bit of a chameleon, so although it was a change from anything I'd ever experienced, it wasn't a difficult role to play.

On some days I longed for wall-to-wall carpeting and coordinating drapes, but the colors and patterns that appealed to me weren’t “the latest fashion” and so couldn't be found in the stores that sell such stuff (or maybe subconsciously something deep within me was repulsed by the idea of conforming). In my little suburban castle, wooden floors peeked out around remnant rugs, and windows were hung with home-made curtains. Our house wasn’t shabby; it was - like one of its occupants - just a little schizophrenic.

One thing that had enamored me of this particular house was that the lot was large and backed up to the remains of an orchard. In fact, our back yard had been part of that orchard, as the apple tree outside the dining room window attested, and the large barn that once graced the acreage-turned-housing tract straddled the two "vacant" lots next-door. I secretly loved this weathered, elephantine "eyesore" and sometimes took my 2-year-old daughter into it to explore and play.

The neighbors were nice folks, although they always struck me as being adults. The women and I had mom-hood in common. None of us worked “real” jobs, so we did the things suburban women do - swapped recipes and potty training strategies, watched each other's children, kept house (to varying degrees), and shopped - but that was about where our commonality ended. They did crafts; I tore the boards off another old barn and paneled my family room. When it was finished, I framed up a darkroom beside it. I dug up some evergreen trees from a nearby wood and planted them in my front yard.

Subconsciously at least, I fought this IBM wife role. At social events my skirt was too short, my hair too long. I tried to convince myself that the other salesmen and their wives were swell people (which they probably were) even though they reminded me of what we called “the clique” back in my high school days.

My husband was a good salesman, in fact, one of IBM’s top 15 rookies nationwide that year. My husband also drank. He always had, but in college everybody drank and it was considered normal. Now he drank more. We argued about it, and his drinking began to fit into a pattern of drink too much, promise not to drink any more, have “just one drink” (which the next night became two, and then the following night three), and then he’d make the same unrealistic promise and the cycle would start again. On day four of these cycles, things got thrown and smashed. As he was wont to point out, my upbringing by a pair of tea-totalers didn’t help matters. For the first time in my life, I began to experience a long stretch of unhappiness, worry and fear.

Depression crept over me like a fog. Self-pity and anger tangled up with love and despair. There were weeks when yesterday’s dirty dishes littered the place until I had to use them again, and there was the night we stood together in the kitchen, separated by only a few feet and his drunkenness, and I edged closer to a chef’s knife lying on the counter with the intention of plunging it into him, stopped only by the more rational thought that he was big and strong and that I, the mother of a toddler, couldn’t afford to chance dying.

I’d seen the dysfunctional families of my foster sisters, watched them struggle and self-destruct. Some were just way down on their luck, but most were pathological and made poor choices or allowed other people to beat them down. I somehow reasoned that if I remained in my current situation, I was as sick as they were. It wasn’t any brilliant motivator, but that thought – that I was as sick as those poor people if I stayed where I was – somehow gave me the strength to take action.

Months of separation and counseling followed. During the separation I moved "home" to my parents' house in a neighboring town. I found a part-time job waitressing and another in the community services office of a juvenile detention center, enrolled my daughter in daycare, and bought a car, all steps to regaining some measure of the independence I had lost to the marriage. In early September, we reconciled and I returned to married life under the conditions that I would keep my day-job and I would take an already-planned trip to Norfolk to visit my old singing partner. Counselling continued, and things were better, but by Thanksgiving I knew they were not good enough. I would wait until after the holidays...

Christmas came and passed, and then New Year's, but inertia had me in its grip and married life continued.

Three days into the new year, a man walked into the probation office where I was working. I happened to be alone, so we talked for some time about our respective programs and then strayed to sharing a little of the paths that had led us to our current jobs. I off-handedly mentioned that I was getting a divorce and that the working hours my job required were convenient for my child and me, as we would be beginning life on our own. The sound of those words emanating from my mouth surprised me. Later, while locking the office door, I spoke aloud to myself: “There. You’ve said it. Now go do it,” and that night I told my husband I was going to file for the divorce. We had tried. Counseling had helped, our marriage was somewhat better, but it was not the way I wanted to live the rest of my life. My days of being an IBM salesman's wife were over.

Just before leaving my suburban split-level for the last time, I made two discoveries. In a paper bag under some things in a closet, torn to shreds, was my favorite dress. It was one I’d made of a blue handkerchief cotton print, a dress I'd worn to usher for a local summer stock theatre, my counselor-suggested "independent activity" that left my husband home to baby-sit and gave me an occasional night out. The other discovery was something hidden above my head on top of the kitchen cupboards: his wedding ring, the one he’d told me he must have lost when emptying the trash.

About two years later I married the man who had stopped in my office on January 3, 1971, the stranger who heard me mention off-handedly that I was getting a divorce. We celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary last fall, but of course that is another story.

An Evening's Photographs

In town, the photo op was man-made and peopled: four ballerinas were enjoying some fresh air on the fire escape of an upstairs ballet studio.

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.................................Pas de Fire Escape


A few minutes later and a few miles away, I encountered a subject of an entirely different sort:
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...............................................Sun and Barn Sinking
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And by nightfall, the moon and a planet were sharing secrets in a darkening sky:
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............................................Sky Companions
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Good night!
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Photography

I’ve put myself “out there” for crowds for as long as I can remember. Something within screams, “PEOPLE! LISTEN UP! I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY!” and I sing or act (or lately, post a photograph). Did it begin back in grade-school when I first tapped across the black stage boards and heard applause? Was it when the high school voice teacher heard me singing and asked, “Where have you been?” (Is it attention I crave)? For a long time I favored the performing arts because - frankly - I was better at them than I was at sketching.

My college career was pretty checkered. I was the first of my family to go to college, and even in my teenage naivety I realized that I should eventually come out of it with some kind of career. As it seemed to me, that career ought to be made from something I enjoyed doing, a piecing together of new-found college-taught knowledge and a love of… well, what? (I probably should note here that because my dad worked at R.I.T., I qualified for free tuition at most other colleges and universities; I also earned a NYS scholarship that paid all of my room and board costs. College for me was free, and if it hadn't been so, I couldn't have gone.)

My life’s passions to that point had been horses, nature, singing in coffee houses and “hootenannies,” theatre, writing, cheerleading, and a boy named Phil. The last two didn’t seem to have a future, and the first four weren’t anywhere in the curriculum at the college I was about to enroll in. I did a twelfth grade “I-search” paper on journalism, but during my first weeks of college, a wonderful teacher convinced me that geology was the major for me. I loved his class, although nagging at the back of my mind was the question, “What the hell kind of career is geology??” Luckily (maybe), I got sick – really sick – and had to drop out of college five months later.

I recovered and regrouped. As Bob Dylan was writing then, “Thought I’d had some ups and downs till I rambled into New York Town; buildin’s goin’ up to the sky, people goin’ down to the ground.” I transferred to a school in New York and registered as a sociology major. With three foster sisters, it was something I knew a little bit about. I hung out in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village every chance I got. Once I even sang on Washington Square. It was the ‘60s, and New York was where it was at. The trouble was, I hated the head of the Sociology Department. He was a sociologist, not a social worker, and he was a total jerk, so when I heard about a junior year abroad program in Austria, I packed my trunk.

Austria provided a liberal arts program with no particular major emphasis. Fine by me. I studied art history, French, German, philosophy, history – all interesting, and none of the program particularly difficult. At the end of that alpine school year, I couldn’t imagine returning to traffic and concrete, nor could I imagine that a person could do “social work” anywhere but in a city: chuck that career idea. I dropped out of school… again.

I worked as a dental assistant, sterilizing instruments, developing x-rays, making plaster models of teeth and handing stuff to the doc’s. After several months of being under-appreciated and underpaid, I got fed-up and quit. It was October, and the department stores were hiring Christmas help, so I applied and got a job selling lingerie. After Christmas I was offered my own department: Junior Lingerie… cute little bras for cute little boobs... and it was there one afternoon, by the escalator, that a passing photo student from R.I.T. snapped my picture. By evening we were developing things in his darkroom…

I met his friends and classmates at a party – photog’s all, and some musicians. I saw the movie “Blow-up.” I began singing with a small group we called “The Handful of Change” and two of us recorded the short sound-track for another photo student’s film. I modeled for a soon-to-be fashion photographer. Late nights I’d be at the jazz club where folks like Coleman Hawkins played after hours. I was in hog heaven and not missing school one bit.

And then, came the dawn…! It occurred to me that by using a camera, I could create what my clumsy hands could not. I could express the passions of my soul! There was an eight-week summer program at R.I.T. where I could take all of my freshman photo courses in intensity. My new friends were heading home for the summer, and they loaned me darkroom and camera equipment. I immersed myself in studio, classroom, and shooting assignments during the day and spent my night hours in a make-shift darkroom. I hardly ate during that time, using lunch hour to crop and dry-mount prints, wolfing dinner so that I could get down to my basement trays of developer, stop and fixer. I was the only student in the program who had no previous photography experience, and I was also the only female. I loved every minute of it, and despite my sizable experience handicap, earned a B for those “freshman” courses.

Two months later, three weeks into my sophomore year in the “Professional Photography” program, I realized I was pregnant.

Time passed. Photography, once a passion, became synonymous with family photo album. I don’t think John Lennon had yet said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans,” but I lived that.

Fast-forward thirty-eight years. The same Minolta camera purchased in 1967 for R.I.T. was still with me, although now at times the shutter was sticking open. We had both registered a lot of things. “Would you like a new camera for your 60th birthday?” my husband asked.

Although the decision was mine, he favored digital. Digital was the buzzword, but I wondered how a digital SLR could possibly compare to a good film camera. I thought of the people I know who fancy themselves photographers… gear queers seemed a more apt description… when all you really need is an understanding of focal length, aperture, film speed – and a good eye… now a wizened eye…

Digital just couldn’t be as wonderful as the feeling of gently rubbing your fingers over a developing print, couldn’t substitute for the peace and joy I used to feel in the dim glow of the darkroom light or the brief illumination cast by the enlarger on paper. My mind zipped to building a darkroom but then tripped on the problem of chemical disposal.

We had a Kodak digital camera at the office, and I began using it. It wasn’t much of a camera (although considered quite better than average at the time it was purchased), but it showed me the possibilities. Husband continued to push digital. It was needed for website work and for his new enterprise and that would help justify the cost of a good camera. He literally led me to a wonderful camera shop above Ben and Jerry’s ice cream parlor in Burlington, and – at age 60 – I emerged with a new Pentax digital SLR.

I submitted one of the first pictures I took with the new camera to North Country Public Radio’s “Photo of the Day” web page, and it was selected. At the end of the year, NCPR asked permission to use that photo in a calendar they were publishing. Several months later, two of my three submissions to the Frederic Remington Art Museum “Amateurs Only” show were selected for exhibition.

Last fall I submitted one photo to Upper Canada Village’s annual photo competition, and despite competing with many wonderful submissions by many good photographers, I won a 2nd place. At the moment I am preparing for my first solo “show” at a local restaurant.

What is creativity, anyway? Why do some of us literally ache to express? Is someone a photographer, a sculptor, a poet, a dancer - or is there a more universal need that finds release in one medium or another, not really caring what the medium is? For me, the need to have a career has passed, replaced by the earned luxury of time to do what pleases me, and taking – and sharing - pictures pleases me greatly. This is my creative passion.

In this blog I have tried to post photos that give glimpses of the natural world, something I love and believe must be preserved. In this way, my photography supports those other things I am passionate about. Coupled with these images of the Wizened Eye have been stories, the photographic muse’s lexical counterpart.

Thanks to each of you who has visited my blog or website and left encouraging words, for to be an artist alone in the wilderness (with no audience) might be unbearable.
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Remembering My Mother



There she is: the redhead in white in the middle of the fun. Behind her, in the white cap, is my father. This was a newspaper photo from the 1930s when she was Rochester, NY, city speed-skating champ and he was the city's men's tennis champion.

And here is a poem written by Shaman:

A wish

May we all find our
way to our mothers
today, or some day.
May we find
the mothers
we miss,
the mothers we wish we had,
and the grandmothers of our
mothers,
where the love waits
unconditionally.
And may we be wise enough
to say thank you for the gifts
they were able to give.

........................Written by Becky Harblin..... May 13, 2007

Happy Mothers Day to each of you who are mothers and who have or had mothers.

You may find more wonderful poems by Becky here.