Category: Cityscape
-
Backyard | Wenatchee, WA | April 2020 It’s clear, but really not so clear, that in this time of distancing we don’t perceive the whole picture. Signals we use to decipher moods and personalities are veiled behind masks or too distant to detect. Digital gatherings (think Zoom and FaceTime) filter voices and emotions crucial to…
-
Sunrise Doves | East Wenatchee, WA | April 2020 The cloud over public mingling — talking, touching, partaking — has partially eclipsed our brilliance. Masks hide smiles and mute voices. Distance weakens the gravitational pull of shared experience. We still get goofy, excited, worried and sad, but many of us do it now in separate…
-
Spring | Wenatchee, WA | April 2020 “At last came the golden month of the wild folk — honey-sweet May — when the birds come back, and the flowers and leaves come out, and the air is full of
-
Goodbye Blooms | Wenatchee, WA | April 2020 The melancholy of impermanence recognizes loss while welcoming what’s to come. Author Mari Fujimoto writes that this wistfulness is regarded in Japan as “the ephemeral nature of beauty — the quietly elated, bittersweet feeling of having been witness to the dazzling circus of life [while] knowing that…
-
Compact | Wenatchee, WA | April 2020 Nothing says shutdown like empty parking lots. Their parallel lines impose unneeded order on an unused expanse. My first instinct on arrival is to shatter the social contract and park catawampus — let Bad Boy emerge (maniac motorist!) to angle our car sideways across three or four spaces.…
-
Atrium | Wenatchee, WA | April 2020 Look up. On a good day there won’t be a single person between you and open sky. It’s the perfect place to let your mind drift free from viral worries. Up is where breezes blow safe and soothing, where clouds sail sanitized by sunlight, where it’s just you…
-
Walk the Line | East Wenatchee, WA | April 2020 Those itty-bitty figures at the top of the photo — dog and owner — stride along a street quieted by quarantine. Very few cars; almost no pedestrians. This is a blessing for the frequent urban walker, always alert to auto and foot traffic, but unsettling…
-
Hay Sheds | Moses Lake, WA | March 2020 Growers here export thousands of tons of hay to Asian beef producers. Shiploads of what’s essentially tall grass link local farmers to those expensive steaks favored by Tokyo execs. (My total knowledge of global economics is now exhausted.) Ag experts would say the hay bales are…
-
Ghost Hand | Moses Lake, WA | March 2020 A voodoo practitioner in New Orleans once told me that spirits shed parts as they fade from the physical realm. I imagined ears and hands and buttocks as detached, transparent wisps blowing across parking lots. “Ectoplasm needn’t take human form,” she said. “Look for vapors in…
-
Bridge | Chelan Falls, WA | March 2020 Things that take us from here to there, that connect us across wide divides, give us reasons to hope. Airplanes and trains, all types of bridges, certain songs and speeches, a phone call from dear Aunt Betty — they all reach beyond where we stand to where…
IrwinFoto 