hello, baby

I have a camera now. And many willing models.

gluttony

My camera is dead. I wasn’t prepared for how lost I’d feel.

I have a healthy immunity against wanting things. Seeing something beautiful rarely makes me yearn to own it. But these last few weeks without my camera, I’ve realized an insatiable greed I do have. A beautiful moment brings a lust to capture it. All around me the city is simmering with rich life, bright life, and I’m split between a nerve-deep happiness to be part of it, and a hot nervy frustration at not being able to grasp it.

It feels like failure. Isn’t the point, the simple lesson of nature to appreciate the moment? To glory in it wholly, to feel it more precious because it will spin out of focus so fast? I don’t these days. I covet, I grab at it, I resent each moment that passes. Because it passes.

I’m moving apartments soon, which I never like to do. I get tripped up in loss, among all the threads that tied me to a place. Today I couldn’t tell you about the freezing winters here, when the heat flies out the rotten window-frames. I couldn’t tell you about the ants that angle in through every crack of the walls on bright days. I only know that my balcony has been home to lush life in the summers. Right now. Tomatoes are swelling their skins. Peppers reach down from stems, stretching back to their soil. Why leave this? Each soft-skinned herb catches the wind with a hundred wings: basil like tidy oval songbird wings, cilantro like ragged tiny moth wings, shiso like paired wings for angels. Why go?

I feel loss, and no control. And I think that’s why I need to grab each moment that I can. Capture, catalog. And why letting them go feels so wrenching.

It’s a cold summer this year. Though it’s disappointing for picnics and games, I think it’s making the city’s other life even more rich and complicated. Caterpillars, birds huddled close together, strange clouds overhead. A riot of seasons. This year pigeons have taken to my balcony. Three of them come home each night around eight, and nestle down to sleep. More arrive for breakfast each morning, bringing news. Yesterday eight of them, today six. How will I remember this? Which days were six, and which were eight, or more?

curly dock, grand avenue

	This is curly dock, but you’ve seen it before. It’s among the most common weeds we know. Sidewalks, roadsides, vacant fields. You may not know that it’s related to sorrel, the culinary green, whose flush of oxalic acid gives its leaves that tangy lemon savor. I didn’t know.
	I also didn’t know sometimes it looks like this. Like a fairy-tale plant. A candy-castle spire, a unicorn’s horn, a perfect curling cyclone with valentine hearts in its eye. It’s so enchanting, and it’s really real, and it’s rather a pest and a nuisance, until you see.

san fran top ten: a hillside

(click for larger image)

This is the hillside where I spotted this nasturtium, trailing toward the bay. I love its shady, pooly green tranquility, but I do wonder what it would look like in full sun, with all those blossoms blazing firelight…

And this is the last of my photo parade from San Francisco. As soon as my beloved little camera is replaced, I’ll have new moments from around Chicago to share with you. It’s time—the city’s wild flowers are in their glory just now, and we will celebrate them all together.

san fran top ten: alstromeria

(click for larger image)

Another bird, another flower. In my mind, it’s always going to be spring in San Francisco.