I offer these words from Kate Chopin without comment.
Tag Archives: photo-a-day
Photo-A-Day: Rainbow Ice Cream Fantasy
As much as this undertaking is at risk of becoming a blog of pet photos and weird food pictures, it’s perhaps more at risk of morphing into a catalog of Cincinnati murals. There are worse fates.
This gem–the title of which really is something like “Rainbow Ice Cream Fantasy”–is on the corner of 12th and Jackson, I think. It’s right around the corner from the Know Theatre. I was at the Know this afternoon, volunteering for the Fringe Festival. (I replenished the concession coolers for the smaller venues. So, if you see a Fringe show tonight somewhere other than the Know and they’re short on Sprites, blame me.)
This mural surprised me; I didn’t know it was there. And I thought it was pretty. I like the colors (how’s that for a sophisticated aesthetic analysis?). What I also like about it is how it captures the brightness and playfulness of summer from a child’s perspective.
Do you remember that? How much promise the summer held when you were little? The simplest things were so fun and exciting: catching a firefly, staying up late to watch the Dukes of Hazard, getting to play all day long because there was no school, going away to camp. Ice cream, especially, seemed to epitomize summer.
As working adults, it seems like the routine of our lives doesn’t change all that much, come summer (unless, of course, you’re a teacher or you have school-aged children). It takes a lot of effort to tap into that boundless joy and it likewise takes effort to justify that much ice cream. So, I welcome all the ways in which this mural is a reminder of how to be.
By the way, your guess is as good as mine as to what has impaled that poor bunny rabbit in the lower right corner. That’s a nice shout-out, though, to the dark complexities of childhood.
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Photo-A-Day: Disappointed
This is one of the worst sandwiches I’ve ever had. And I have no one to blame but myself. (And the bread and the peanut butter.)
First, I’m weird about peanut butter and jelly together. I don’t know why but something about the thickness of the peanut butter and the slime of the jelly just doesn’t sit right in my mouth. My mouth and I much prefer peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
Second, this afternoon, I was starving. This is never a good place to be. I needed something to eat and it’s nearing the end of the week which means the pickings are slim. There was an old loaf of sprouted bread and half a jar of peanut butter in the fridge. (We buy the natural kind of peanut butter that needs to be stirred and stored in the fridge–it’s a lot of work. But it’s not full of sugar.)
Sometimes, healthy food just doesn’t work. The fancy pants sprouted bread ripped when I tried to smear the fancy pants peanut butter on it. The peanut butter may have been organic and natural, but it was also cold and it just shredded the bread. An utter disappointment. And I ate it anyway.
Sadly, this photo really doesn’t capture the degree of grossness of this sandwich. And I apologize for harping on a first world problem. This nasty, torn-up sandwich, though, was really an apt metaphor for a day of confusion and disappointment (well, the whole day wasn’t that way). What am I doing here? And why am I wasting my time on this travesty of a lunch?
Tonight at dinner, my spouse says to me, “Why didn’t you just toast the bread?”
Well, hell. Why didn’t I just toast the bread? The bread would have been harder, more durable, and the peanut butter would have softened on the warm bread.
I promised myself the photo-a-day project wouldn’t become a catalog of food pictures or an advice blog. But now that I’ve shown a picture of food, I need to offer some advice, namely to myself: when life serves me a craptastic lunch, I am going to toast it first.
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Photo-A-Day: Starters, Brains, and Babies
Let’s get it started. The sourdough, kefir, and kombucha, that is.
Tonight I went to a workshop to learn about how to make these cultured, fermented goodies. The workshop was organized by the herdshare I belong to. In Ohio, you can buy into a herd of dairy cows and because you “own” a portion of the herd, you get to share in a portion of the product (provided you pay your monthly “boarding” fee). Participating in a herdshare is a legal way to get raw milk and other raw dairy products.
[Raw Milk Sidebar: Raw milk has not been cooked; it is raw. It has not been pasteurized and it has not been homogenized. It is alive, teeming with enzymes and vitamins. When it’s cooked (i.e., pasteurized), all those enzymes die and many of the vitamins break down. When it’s forced through small tubes at high speeds (i.e., homogenized), the shape of the lipids gets altered, basically voiding the fats of any value. If you’d like to know more about raw milk, I highly recommend Ron Schmid’s The Untold Story of Milk. It’s a 500-page lesson in biochemistry and the politics of hysteria. And it’s a damn good read.]
So, we belong to a herdshare so that we can (legally) get raw milk, yogurt, cheese, butter, etc. The cows are “boarded” and cared for by an Amish farming family that lives about 2.5 hours from Cincinnati. Adam, the head of the Amish family, is a very enterprising young man: he relies on the assistance and technical know-how of a handful of “English” (non-Amish like me…and I’m guessing you, if you’re, you know, on the Internet reading this) folks to help him run his business. The herdshare has an ordering Web site, we’ve got a Facebook page, there’s a cell phone number we can call if we have questions and issues and someone (obviously not Adam) will answer the phone and help us out.
Anyway, the Facebook group decided an evening of fermentation was in order. So, tonight, we learned how to make sourdough bread, kefir, and kombucha. If you’re unfamiliar with kefir, it’s a fermented dairy drink that’s almost yogurt-like. It originated in Eastern Europe, I believe, and it has many lovely, living things that keep your gut healthy. Similarly, Kombucha is an ancient elixir and tea that comes from Russia (or China–I’ve heard both). It’s a fermented tonic. And sourdough bread is, well, sourdough bread. Easier to digest than other bread products because the culture helps break down the flour so it’s easier to digest.
A big treat this evening was that Adam, his wife, and two of their four children were at the workshop. It was refreshing to see him again–I had met him a couple of years ago when I drove out to his farm to meet the cows. That’s a good story–for another time.
So, what you see in today’s picture (left to right) is the sourdough starter, the kombucha “baby,” and the kefir “brain.” We’ll see how my adventures in fermentation go. I need to go ahead and put the kefir brain in some milk tonight. Better go get started…
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Photo-A-Day: Viewfinder
This is my viewfinder. These two pups and their floppy black ears.
One of the most amazing things about Cincinnati–and a huge selling point for me when I moved here 4 years ago–was the parks. Wow. The city proper has about 300,000 (the total for the suburbs and tri-state is about 2 million) and yet there are huge, beautiful parks everywhere. My favorite is Mt. Airy, a 1500 acre forest about 5 minutes from my house. Plenty of trails there for the dogs and me to hike on.
I’ve passed a lot of my time just like this: walking down a trail at Mt. Airy with these two cattle dog mutts in front of me. I’ve seen this sight so often, it’s such a ritual part of my life, that it’s almost weird to see it in a photo. I can close my eyes and see Prufrock and Scout marching down the trail, flopping their ears, and I ache knowing that one day I will cease to see this sight. (Pruf is about 11 and a half–that’s all I’m going to say.)
So, welcome to my viewfinder, the image that shapes my world. Both of these dogs are rescues and I’m grateful for the way their spirit and their form have framed my life.
(I warned you all that there would be a lot of dog pictures in this photo-a-day project.)
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Photo-A-Day: Missing
Well, this post is about missed opportunities. It’s Memorial Day and we went paddle-boating on a big lake in a nearby park. Neither of us had our phones nor the camera. There were ample and amazing photo opportunities: a heron, a log full of mallards plucking at themselves, geese dancing in the water, grandpas and grandchildren fishing…
Yeah, I got pictures of none of it.
So, when we got home, Andrea suggested I walk down the street and take a picture of our neighbor’s house. H was an elderly gentleman and used to walk up and down the street every day, keeping his eyes peeled for trouble. When he was done walking, he’d sit on his porch, drinking beer, and he would call out to anyone who passed by, saying something he thought was very witty and clever. (Much of what passed for witty and clever for H seemed a bit on the offensive side to me and some of my neighbors.)
H was a Vietnam vet and despite being a bit culturally out of step with things like, you know, racial integration, women’s rights, and the gays, his heart was in the right place. He often insulted how I cut the grass in the front yard, yet buried in the insult was a tip for how to do it better next time. Once, he refurbished an electric weed whacker for me because he didn’t like the way I edged the lawn. I used that weed whacker today and I thought of him.
H had a lot of knowledge of what happened on our street. He knew who lived where and what people’s routines were. He held the cultural knowledge of our street in his, um, narrow little mind. I wonder how many streets and neighborhoods have that anymore. And we need these kinds of civic institutions–these neighbors who know.
Well, anyway, Scout and I walked down the street after dinner today to snap a picture of H’s house. His family had put the flag out front and it was waving in the breeze. The chair H used to sit on was visible along with the bag of charcoal that always sat next to him. This was going to be an epic, Americana photo.
Scout yanked her leash just as I mashed the button on the camera. I didn’t realize until I got home how badly I mangled the shot. Because it’s been a day of missed photo ops I decided to just go with my lousy picture.
So, hat off to you, H. May you rest well. Thank you for serving in Vietnam (though I’m sorry you had to go there at all), thank you for protecting our street, and thank you for the weed whacker.
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Photo-A-Day: American Past Time
Here is our photo for Sunday, May 26 (yes, still a day behind). Over Memorial Day weekend, I got to engage in the ultimate American past time: baseball. The Reds lost to the Cubs in the 10th inning. Bummer.
The Ohio River really attracts me; I’m drawn to it. Yet, I rarely see it. Downtown Cincinnati, including Great American Ball Park (the Reds’ stadium), sits right on the Ohio but you don’t really know that unless you’re there. And yesterday, I was there.
It’s interesting to me that baseball is the great American past time because for all the number crunching and statistics, it’s really a game of luck and psychology. Players can be psyched or psyched out. Being able to hold that mental edge over your opponent seems (to me at least) to be the deciding factor in a baseball game. Since we’ve chosen this as a our national past time, I’m wondering what this says about us. America is the land of luck and chance? I don’t know for sure, but I know I need to keep my wits about me.
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Photo-a-Day: Two for One Journey
Ok, so the weekends clearly are going to be hard for me. It’s not the photo part that’s hard; it’s the writing. To make up for my tardiness I’m offering two for the price of one here.
At the risk of sounding completely cliched, this two photos remind me of journeys, in part because it was something of a journey to capture these images.
We spent part of Saturday exploring the Eden Park area of Cincinnati. After taking in some views of the Ohio River, we discovered a trail that led from one picnic area to another. The trail was secluded and wooded, which made it seems a bit mystical to me. We played around with taking photos of the gnarled roots, stone steps, and wind-swept trees. My partner changed some settings on the camera and captured the below image. I like the contrast in this photo because I think it represents the paradox of journeying–trekking into darkness because the possibility of light might be there.
Photo Credit: Andrea L. Rotter
I also like this photo because it feels Kurosawa-esque (I’ve taught Rashomon a million times, so it’s hard to see the trees filtering the sun and not think of his camera work.)
As for the first photo, I found that on the edge of a mural in a nearby neighborhood. I don’t know if the fish are supposed to be salmon, going home to spawn (they don’t really look like salmon unless maybe they are chinook?). Whatever it is, the fish are in some kind of motion, and again, it was something a journey to find and capture this exact image. I had to practice looking.
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Photo-a-Day: Guns and Guitars
Ok, so I’m late on this post, which is a bummer. I was all ready yesterday evening to post and then I got distracted watching a movie and forgot. So, here goes, May 24th’s photo.
Let’s face it: the world needs more guitars than guns and more guitars than even watches or TVs. I’ve been thinking a lot about guitars lately, namely mine. I need to play it. Right now, it sits propped against the wall, watching me. Occasionally, I bump into it or Scout bumps into it, and I hear the deep resonant sound. And I miss it. I’m not sure why I don’t play it other than I’m not that good and that frustrates me.
I’ve also been thinking lately about breath, the foundation of music and of all our energies. Guess what? I don’t do enough breathing either. Why is is that we know we want to do something but we balk? In Gestalt therapy, it’s important to examine how we benefit from not changing (in other words, we need to be curious about our resistance rather than railroad through it in pursuit of some distant future).
On another subject, I’m sure there’s something really smart I could say here about the politics of lending, gentrification, and maybe even class warfare. But instead, I talked about how much I miss my guitar.
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Photo-a-Day: Playing Fetch
So, today’s photo is of the dogs: Prufrock (left) and Scout (right). You will probably get tired of seeing images of the dogs although I never tire of their beautiful faces.
Speaking of getting tired, that was the whole point of our outing. Instead of our usual walk, I took them an open field a few blocks away to play fetch. Even though he’s about 11, Pruf is a master fetcher. Just look at him. He’s brought me back his ball (where is Scout’s ball? Nowhere to be found), he’s looking at me, he is ready to go.
In contrast, Scout, who’s about 4, loves to run around but only brings the ball back about 70% of the time. (Pruf usually goes to get me Scout’s ball after he’s dropped of his.) Her favorite place in the world is right next to him. She likes to lay on him, touch him, lick him, be with him.
Clearly, I’m a dog person. I love these creatures: they really complete my life. When I travel for work, I experience such a dearth of sensation. In hotel rooms, there’s no clippity-clop of clumsy paws, no jangling of collar charms. I can’t look into their deep brown eyes, touch their fur (Pruf is coarse and wiry; Scout is silky smooth and soft), or feel their hot breath on my face. (I miss my partner, too, but you know, we can talk on the phone, Skype, email, text, etc.)
Well, I fear this post is official maudlin and veering into the land of cliches about (wo)man’s best friend. Dogs live with a presence that I envy. They work hard and let it go. And I’m grateful for what these two have taught me and continue to teach me.
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Hope McAllister Miller 