getting warm

Spring. Outside, people walked down the middle of the street instead of mincing along the flooded sidewalks. Their shoes rasped against the sidewalk and its heaps of grit and salt while at the edges and from the heights there were the softer sounds of water.

I spent an hour on my porch listening to spring break children scheme and then a second hour in the patch of sunlight in my upstairs bathroom, getting warm.


Winnipeg, MB. April 1, 2005.

For some reason, I am especially drawn to mid-afternoon light. It isn't especially subtle with its lights and darks, but it is textured in a way that early morning and overcast isn't.

Winnipeg, MB. April 1, 2005.

There was also something especially satisfying about salted peanut shells in my great-aunt's handmade bowl; the african violets in the window, the blot of paint on the floor. I also like how everything in the picture is in progress:

the sun moving across the floor, lengthening the shadows and the leaves of a plant I've tended for four years,

the peanuts digesting in my belly even as I shot the shells,

the bowl that my great-aunt made decades before I was born next to a blot of paint I made two years ago.