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A well-known proverb reminds us that there is a season or everything. This idea has helped me adapt to various stages of life, and associated mobility or lack of. I lived an adventurous youth in exotic places due to the career and billet assignments Mom and Dad enjoyed. It has been a tough act to follow once calibrated to that level of stimulation. My expectation, if not literal need, for new and exciting places and varied activities has demanded indulgence for a good part of my life. Photography may be the perfect companion activity for such inclinations. I have enjoyed travels to a lot of places and did a fair job of documenting most of them. Just as the climatic seasons change, so do the seasons of life. I found myself imprisoned by my health and circumstances and in want of change.
Just as the theme of those stories of men who search the world over for riches who then return home only to discover acres of diamonds in their own backyards--so have I discovered such treasures nearby--often literally under my feet--and very certainly in my own backyard. The ease of digital photography and the immediate feedback it provides, combined with decent enough plastic zoom lenses and macro capabilities, has piqued then filled the need and subsequent satisfaction to those artistic leanings that we all have more of less. And the literal products given for the taking are far out of proportion to the effort--espeically when it becomes mostly effortless, yielding to the autopilot developed and honed over a lifetime. Finding the acreas of diamonds within the confines of wherever one finds oneself is an adventure of discovery too.
Situated smack in the middle of horse country and a historic and scenic natural place to live--this horse farm located less than a mile away--becomes just one of an enormous smorgsborg of exotic desination--albeit available as a sidewhow to any utilitarian trips to market--though generally few and far between.
It took about five minutes to compose and take about eighty distinctly different pictures of this place from my slowly rolling truck. By starting at one end of the scene on the opposite shoulder of the road with my emergency lights flashing to appease impatient traffic (which it did not, but it at least alerted them so they could flip me off, preferable to being hit), I was able to inch along and compose various different scenes using the foreground limbs and brush for framing in conjunction with the zoom and exposure controls of the inexpensive little camera.
I have passed this place a lot and mentally bookmarked it for photographing another day. I think it was the field of yellow flowers that finally got me to stop--or at least slow down. I left many hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs there yet to be taken--well, no, actually an infinity of pictures still there. The thing is that any place is never static. The changing hues of vegetation, or none, that go with the seasons, coupled with the changing sky, light, and shadows cast, or not, plays out enumerable patterns with the fences and farm structures. The horses are never in the same place.
I do have to be careful these days--what with all the terrorist stuff. People are spooked--and spooky. Right here. I will try not to be a statistic of mistaken intentions here near home after a lifetime of considerable forays into the bush, the mountains, the wilderness, the deserts, the oceans, and rivers and pretty or ugly zones, of strange peoples and villages and towns and scared cities of ugly and pretty and pretty ugly and sublime foreign destinations--survival secured.
It could happen. I recall the desperate final thoughts whilst near oblivion a few years back while choking to death at a church social on a piece of watermelon.
"No, this can't be. Please God, give me the dignity, instead of poetic justice. Let it not be said, here lies a poor fool who met his match in the form of a wrongly lodged piece of overly juicy watermelon at a church social--amidst friends and brethren who understood not what he failed to spaketh."
The horror, not of impending death, but of the content of quickly flashing epithets emblazoned upon a granite stone and the resulting attempts to cry out at last dislodged or Heimlic'd the offending obstruction from my throat--with no one the wiser. It is now a reoccurring nightmare--I hope not to revisit for good. It keeps me on my toes.
I have been reported at least once to have a Sheriff's deputy in this county dispatched to check out a suspicious black truck with tinted windows (it came that way) casing out places. People are very protective of their horses. I think I once really freaked the Siek occupants of a temple between here and town a few years ago--while taking pictures through their locked gate. I am prolly not going to be wearing any kind of head-dress while doing this sort of thing.
Anyway, this place, as does any place, keeps on giving these pretty scenes. It is only up to me to catch a few of them.