Image shopping

This morning when I went to the grocery store, I was famished for light and color. I woke to the sound of rain; even before it was light, I could tell the temperature was above freezing by the sound of water trickling off eaves and the wet hiss of rubber tires on puddled pavement.

The soil here in Keene is already saturated with snow melt, so any additional precipitation merely puddles and pools, too much for the earth to absorb. Now at midday the rain is slowly turning to sleet; later, it will turn to snow. But even the prospect of pristine snow doesn’t lighten my spirits: now that it’s March, I’ve grown tired of gray, tired of slush, tired of mud. Sprinkling a topping of snow over a veritable lasagna of freezing rain, slush, and soggy earth doesn’t make for a palatable portion: covering the mess with snow is as efficient a fix as slapping a coat of paint on a rusted wreck.

What we need here in Keene is spring–real spring–an honest-to-goodness influx of light, color, and warmth. But Mother Nature won’t serve up that promised feast until April or May, and the days in between are long, so in the interim I go shopping.

Like those pictures of abundance I blogged several weeks ago, these images from my local grocery store were snapped with my handy pencam. Like me, my pencam thrives on light and color. In dim settings, it produces images that look like this morning’s weather: watery and muted, with blurring colors and washed-out murkiness. But under the bright lights of a grocery store, my pencam zeros in on shape and shadow, capturing the bright colors and sharp contrast that make products seem to pop from their shelves.

As I’ve shared before, I often go shopping with my pencam, wandering all sorts of stores with my Hungry Eye and only occasionally buying anything. No, looking is infinitely more satisfying than buying: the products you see displayed aren’t commodities I wish to own or consume. Instead, I crave the ordered chaos of tightly tangled colors sorted into meticulous rows and columns, my local grocery store being a clean well-lighted place that is amply stocked with visual flavor.

Just as the body needs a nourishing daily allotment of vitamins and minerals, I think my soul needs a healthy dose of optical stimuli, a full panoply from all portions of the visual spectrum. The muted white and gray of a New England winter are fine and good, but my spirit’s starved for richer fare: green and yellow and red, tumbled forth in an exuberant display of nourishing goodness.