Photo Essay: A Different View of Ordinary Stuff

by | Personal, Reflections & Stories

I like to take a walk and look at ordinary things in the environment from a different perspective. When I do, I’m often surprised, sometimes delighted, and occasionally grateful– if for nothing else just the ability to notice momentary beauty, oddity, interesting juxtapositions of lines and color, light and shadow.

 

Child's eye view of playground benches and table

Is this what you’d ordinarily see if you were the height of a 3-year old?

Close-up view of spiked fence photo by Christina Leimer

Feels kind of spikey. Why the single black spike among the gold?

The combination of blue shapes attracted my attention and the silver gray etching on the windows below the wave and the silver vent in the upper right give it contrast.

The combination of blue shapes at this building entrance attracted my attention. The silver gray etching on the windows below the wave and the silver vent in the upper right give it contrast.

Juxtaposition of curvy and straight lines, color and textures in this closeup photo of part of a jungle gym by Christina Leimer

What do you think this is? I like the juxtaposition of curvy and straight lines, complementary color and variety of textures. It’s part of a playground jungle gym.

Light and shadow repeating itself on a tall downtown apartment building in photo by Christina Leimer

I like the repeating sequence of dark and light blocks, staggered sets of vertical bars and long edge lines as the sun slants across them and shades the balconies on this tall downtown apartment building.

Photo with repeating pattern of light and shadow with depth of field

Another repeating pattern that caught my attention. The light and shadow in the downtown apartment building can look flat, depending on how you see it. In this set of stairs the depth is clear in the lighter background columns.

Water in a fountain looks like glass when you stop its action in a photo

Water in a fountain falling on rocks looks like old, rough glass when you stop its flow in a photo.

Tree Friends

by | Personal, Reflections & Stories

Tree Friends

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, occasionally my dad would decide it was time to cut down a pear tree that had grown up in the fence row. “It’s messing up the fence and producing spotty fruit,” he’d say. “I’m gonna cut ‘er down.”

Then I’d throw a fit, arguing that you can’t just cut down a perfectly good tree because of where it lives. It didn’t bother me that it didn’t produce edible fruit, or any fruit at all. And the fence didn’t appear to me to be suffering. Besides, you can always move a fence.

Ultimately my dad relented and the tree was safe until the next time it annoyed him.

Eventually we moved away and most of the farm was sold, turned into a subdivision with streets, houses and no fences. But at times I wondered about that fruit tree.

As an adult, my affinity for plants is the way others feel about their pets. I can’t say I have the greenest of thumbs, but I feel a protectiveness and companionship. My living space isn’t complete without plants. When we move, I rent a vehicle specifically to move my plants. Even though I don’t have that many of them, I want them to be comfortable and to survive.

So it was out of character, in preparing for a cross-country move, when I thought about leaving a plant behind. It had lost all but one of its leaves and was nothing more than twigs on a quarter-round trunk-like stalk. “I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t throw it away and no one would want it,” I told my partner. “If it’s still bare when we leave, maybe I’ll just set it in the vacant lot beside our house. Then it’s on its own.”

Within a week, buds popped up on its twigs. By the time we were ready to go, it had sprouted three leaves, all on the same side of its trunk. “I guess it wants to go with us,” I said, amazed at its effort to show it was alive.

A few months ago I visited my hometown after decades away. Driving by the farmhouse I was born in, on the edge of the subdivision that used to be our farm, I thought about the fruit tree I’d fought to save as a kid. Then I noticed, about where I remembered it should be, an old tree and a single fence post. Surely not, I thought.

I turned into the drive, got out of my car, walked to the tree and felt an elated sense of anticipation and discovery. I looked under it, around it, touched its crispy, tattered leaves. Took one and examined its lightly serrated edges. It’s an old tree, for sure. Split and speckled. And an old fencepost, pocked and shredded. Could it really be?

Returning home, I checked the web. Pear trees in the wild can live more than 50 years. That meant, it could be my childhood tree! I was ecstatic. The tree I’d defended was still alive, anchored in land I once loved.

But then, as I so often do, I questioned. Is it even a pear tree? I’m not sure how to tell. Maybe it’s a different tree planted later in the same spot, I reasoned. But why would someone plant a new tree in a fence row? And if that was the case, why leave the fence post but take away the fence?

I couldn’t just let the questions go unanswered, so I shared the tree’s picture with the Missouri Native Plant Society to find out what kind of tree it is. Probably a plum tree, they think. Well, what to make of that? Maybe I’m misremembering the fruit. According to my research, it’s uncommon, but some plum trees are known to live 30 years in the wild. That timespan, though, wouldn’t be long enough to make it my tree.

So I don’t know if it’s my tree. But does a “yes it is” or “no it’s not” really matter? Facts are important. But sometimes they’re not the takeaway from an experience. When our house plant quickly sprouted leaves, I simply accepted my immediate sense that it wanted to go with us. I didn’t second-guess my interpretation. Nor did I struggle to explain its sudden growth spurt. Through multiple moves, I’ve watched, with pleasure, its continued leafing. It now sits on our porch, content and full. My immediate sense of the old plum-pear tree felt like embracing a long lost friend, one I’d helped to survive. Perhaps that’s the takeaway. Whether my tree lived only 5 more years and was replaced, or lived 50 more and still exists, it was a visceral reminder that, like friends, plants and people can connect, the life force of each enlivening the other.

Today, as I’ve been worrying about the facts, my brother sent a photo. That old tree is blooming, and it’s a cherry tree. Black cherry trees can live up to 250 years.

Simple Things

by | Personal, Reflections & Stories

Simple Things

An odd thing happened the morning we all learned, what for many of us was, the unthinkable results of our presidential election. Interspersed with the anger, fear, and emotional chaos of a world that suddenly seems on the precipice of catastrophe, sparks, like fire flies on a Midwest summer night, appeared unexpected—blinking and disappearing, yet soothing and sublime.

During these few weeks…

  • In my tiny town, on the edge of San Francisco Bay, the shortest Main Street in America turns into Ark Row, named because its buildings were once houseboats. Draped by massive trees that raise the sidewalk and bend around buildings, the narrow street curves, offering little space for cars. A woman stepped off the curb to get into her parked car, then noticed on the windshield a pie pan sized leaf, blazing green and unblemished. She picked it up, glancing down, then up, furtively, just as I walked by. I smiled, she returned the smile. I said “a gift for you.”  I was thinking about taking it home, she said. And she did.

 

  • Sitting with my morning coffee, facing the living room window, the sun streaming in backlit the steam rising from my coffee cup—a swirling white ring spinning along its rim, volcano-like as it rose and dispersed, twisting wisps, a lazy cyclone, billowing, tapering, fading away.

 

  • On December 21st, we listened to Windham Hill’s Winter Solstice Concert, acoustic guitar, piano, cello. At moments, I melted into the music, enfolded in beauty free of words, relaxed into a sense of being without edges, on the longest night of the year—the dividing line, when light will begin again.

 

  • It’s migration season and the air is so filled with birds that part of the bay is off limits to give them safe harbor. At times, hundreds fly so low, they seem to be skittering—running on water. Seals and sea lions break the surface, from a distance–the head of a dog, back undulating like an eel. I watch in reverie when suddenly, a porpoise bursts straight up, fully out of the water, arches and dives beneath the waves. My body tingles with delight. Then anticipation, of another leap.

 

  • The softness of my wife’s hand, silky, warm down; and my own, coarser—pressing the skin between my index finger and thumb. It doesn’t spring back immediately, like it used to—but it feels right.

 

Such simple things. They feed us, and bring light to the darkness. They’re there all the time, but at least for me, they stand out most clearly against the night.