Category: Portfolios
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Back of Bloom | East Wenatchee, WA | August 2019 Don’t forget the under, the rear, the flip side. It’s below and behind where much of life’s mechanics take place. Power lines, food deliveries, maintenance tasks often intersect behind the facade, at the rear door. When progress is hindered or entry blocked, when questions remain…
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Horse Neck | Twisp, WA | August 2019 Bright on one side, dim on the other. In astrophysics, the line where light ends and darkness begins is called the terminator. It’s evident as orbiting planets spin into day, then night, then repeat. But we also see this curiosity in earthbound situations. A kind of terminator…
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Work Gloves | Twisp, WA | August 2019 I peeled off the gloves to discover the lines of my hands had imprinted on the rubberized fabric. Finger creases and palm prints showed that I’d gripped a rake handle for an hour. Unusual, yes, but maybe all clothes retain evidence of our activities? Jeans wrinkled at…
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Sunset | Twisp, WA | August 2019 Some people are avid appreciators of a setting sun. Almost every evening for two years, my Dad sat on an overturned bucket to watch the sun go down at the edge of his new property. He later kicked aside the bucket, built a house on that exact spot…
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Ninth Floor View | Airway Heights, WA | August 2019 Our hotel room window opened onto a curving roadway where a confusion of lines, shapes and shadows competed for my attention. A white car turned onto the road below and, almost instantly, lent weight to the scene’s center, added cohesiveness to the whole. Don’t we…
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Buddha | Waterville, WA | July 2019 Buddha loiters on the fringes, I’ve noticed. He stands dusty on book shelves, next to shoe boxes in closets, peeking from windows in small towns. He seeks the low places — no spotlight, applause or worship — where his smile might lift a heavy heart. Perhaps we find…
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Roadside Pullout | Washington Highway 155 | July 2019 Landscape Week | I remind myself: Stop and step from the car when geology looms so large. Windshields diminish the wondrous. Stand at cliff edge and stretch — arms open to the sky, mind open to
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Basalt | Electric City, WA | July 2019 Landscape Week | Life here is built atop basalt. A layer lies just beneath our grocery store’s parking lot. Our dog-walking trail runs between basalt escarpments. Chunks of it accent our home’s landscaping. Roughly 15 million years ago the earth cracked open and released lava flows that…
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Shadow | Harrington, WA | July 2019 Landscape Week | Lin Yutang, the Chinese writer and philosopher (d. 1976), often wrapped the profound in the practical. Such as, “When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set.” This double-edged wisdom describes sundown, of course, but also
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Outcrop | Palisades, WA | July 2019 Landscape Week | I recently watched this basalt outcrop shed pieces of itself. Outside forces shifted mass, loosened foundations, cracked pillars. Big and little chunks tumbled. The minor avalanche was a good reminder that what’s solid today might not be tomorrow. In our own lives, of course, the…