Today’s Photo Friday theme is Best of 2005. I don’t know if this is my “best” photo from the past year…but it’s certainly one of my all-time favorites. Taking good pictures on a good day in Keene is child’s play: aim your camera and shoot. If I take a lot of alluring pictures, that’s in large part because I live in a particularly photogenic town…and I carry my camera everywhere, taking at least a handful of pictures everyday.

Although I didn’t list in my Favorite Five countdown the post in which this photo originally appeared, it is one of my favorite Keene-related blog-entries, telling as it does the story of how I came to teach and then live here. Best of all, if you do a Google search for prettiest town on earth, my post is first…and if you do a Google search for prettiest town in America, my post about little ol’ Keene is second, bested only by the Chamber of Commerce site for Woodstock, Vermont.

So, when it comes to asserting America’s prettiest town, who are you going to believe: a Chamber of Commerce site hawking the tourist virtues of some town in Vermont, or an independent, no-strings-attached site written by someone who chronicles her town in all weathers, day in and day out? While you decide for yourself whose town in the fairest of them all, I’ll remain steadfast in my belief that an image of a picture-perfect white church spire nestled in white crabapple blossoms against a spring-blue sky is the best it gets in 2005 or any other year.