Hoarded Ordinaries

Straight on the heels of yesterday’s Top Ten third blogiversary post, today’s Photo Friday theme is Best of 2006. What I love most about this self-portrait (origianlly posted here) is the fact that I took it with a cheap keychain camera. Who needs fancy photographic equipment if you have photo-editing software and a dash of creativity?

If you’re feeling nostalgic, check out my Best of 2005 and Best of 2004 posts. Enjoy!

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted any reflective photos, so here’s an image of me reflected in a mirror-ball at the hospital where I visited a dear friend this morning. Yesterday was my third blogiversary–it’s been three years and a day since I posted my first tentative entry here on Hoarded Ordinaries–so a reflective shot seems an appropriate way of looking back on another year of blogging.

The day after my first and second blogiversaries, I posted a list of my top five favorite blog posts from the previous year. This year, I felt particularly hesitant about dipping into my blog archives: what if I didn’t find five posts that were worthy of the “best of the best” monniker? I guess three years and a day after wondering if blogging was something I could do, I’m still fairly insecure about my abilities. Blogging is something I do indeed do…but my Inner Perfectionist isn’t sure it’s something I do well enough, the existential questions I posed back in July being ones I still haven’t answered to my satisfaction.

Having admitted this bit of self-doubt, though, I can simultaneously say that skimming through this past year’s archive was, as always, an interesting experience: what a long strange trip it’s been, once again. In trying to come up with my Favorite Five posts from this past year, I decided to share my Top Ten instead. It’s not that 2006 was a particularly profound year here; instead, no five posts among the following ten stood head-and-shoulders above the rest, so I’m sharing them all.

Snow ghosts after dark, February 4, 2006. Some posts flow quite naturally from the photos that accompany them: it’s almost as if the images tell their own story, and I simply write a transcript. This entry about an art opening I attended in downtown Keene on a foggy winter night is one of those posts, with fog-blurred images that are as evocative as the accompanying words.

A spot of May, February 7, 2006. I’ve written a lot of posts about cemeteries, and this is perhaps my favorite. Every writer has (or should have) a handful of authors who serve as personal role-models: reminders of the true power of the pen. For me, May Sarton is one of those authors, and this entry recounts my first-ever visit to her gravesite in nearby Nelson, NH.

Keepin’ it real, February 20, 2006. As well as blogging about cemeteries, I often blog about museums, so here’s my particular take on Dublin’s Natural History Museum (aka the “Dead Zoo”). Since photography is disallowed in the Dead Zoo, this post features pencil sketches of some of its taxidermied inhabitants, creatures who pose quite naturally for an amateur eye.

Art of glass, March 6, 2006. After returning from February’s whirlwind weekend trip to Ireland, in March I went on a campus field trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see their famed glass flowers. Fittingly, I only later learned that the invertebrate models in Dublin’s Dead Zoo were crafted by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, the same glass-workers who made Harvard’s botanical specimens. It seems that the Blaschkas, along with my penchant for natural history museums, are inescapable.

Show & tell, June 6, 2006. One of the highlights of 2006 was a massive Montreal meet-up of some of my favorite bloggers, and this post tells the happy tale of connection (with carefully-cropped pictures to illustrate.)

Embodied, July 18, 2006. In July, I went to another blogger meet-up: this time the Progressive Faith Blog Conference in Montcalm, NJ, where I was the lone Buddhist representative in a sea of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. “Embodied” is the mini-manifesto I wrote in response to the experience of rubbing elbows with fellow spiritual seekers.

Gold guys, July 30, 2006. And speaking of fellow spiritual seekers, some of my best friends are fake! “Gold guys” is my ode to the Providence Zen Center’s most unfailing practitioners: the gold statues that sit motionless in the Center’s various meditation rooms.

The all-seeing eye, September 2, 2006. Another Ireland-inspired post, this one describes a different kind of museum: the renovated and excellently interpreted interior of Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol. If you’ve never thought going to jail could be an interesting and eye-opening experience, read this post to find out why you might be wrong.

Homecoming, September 30, 2006. I like this post because its composition was entirely accidental. On a day I was planning to blog something else, I happened to get stuck in traffic alongside Keene High School’s homecoming parade. A handful of snapshots and some accompanying paragraphs later, I had an essay reminiscing on my own high school days and offering my read on one of Robert Frost’s best-loved poems.

Fallen, October 4, 2006. This is another “accidental” post. On a day I felt I didn’t have much to blog about, I decided to post a single shot of fallen leaves atop a dumpster. In writing the caption for that picture, though, I simply just kept going, adding picture after picture until I’d told the story of my earliest realization of human mortality. Where did that come from?

The fact that two of my Top Ten favorite blog-posts from the past year were accidents probably says something about what I’ve learned over the past three years and a day. Even when you feel like you don’t have something to say, you probably do. And even when you wonder whether you’re doing it well enough, you probably are…at least if you just keep going, adding word after word and image after image. Three years and a day later, that’s a lot of words and images to call your own.

If you or someone you know lost a pair of glasses near Beaver Brook Falls, I know where you can find them, infinitely cleaner after a whole night of almost-freezing rain. If the backdrop of this image looks familiar, it’s because I posted a similar shot on a grading day back in November. Today’s another grading day for the last of my fall semester online classes, so it’s just as well that the day isn’t distracting me with any meteorological charms.

Sunday morning is one of my favorite times to walk: a time when good folks are in church and bad folks are sleeping off their Saturday night. That leaves Sunday morning to dog-walkers and virtuous pagans who rise with the sun for the sake of rising itself.

Sunday morning is a lonely time to walk, and I’ve always loved it for that. This morning while I walked Reggie on a quiet segment of bikepath where he can run off-leash, we twice passed a lone, silver-haired man: once as he walked up the path, and once as he walked back. Walking is a solitary activity; even when I walk and have walked with others, I’m always acutely aware of the solid space between us: you in your shoes, I in mine. Several years ago when asked by a stranger in a bar whether I’d care to go walking with him sometime, I politely demurred: “I prefer to walk alone.” The statement was more than a simple refusal of an unusual pick-up line; it was a personal manifesto, honestly stated.

Recently Annette wrote about the experience of being single at Christmas, a time when all the world’s pity, it seems, is directed toward folks like me who live on our own and without children far away from parents and siblings. This time last year, I contemplated my status as a lone woman out of place in a town full of families during a season focused on children, so I know the “pressure to conform” that Annette writes about. Last night my maternal aunt called to thank me for the Christmas gift I’d sent her and then asked how I was doing, really. A nun who lives in community, she imagined I might be lonely spending the holidays away from family, forgetting the friends I have who serve the same purpose.

I’m no nun, but I appreciate the concern. This afternoon I’ll go to a friend’s open house–the fifth I’ve been to this year–and then I’ll come home to my quiet house and light the Christmas tree that stands bedecked for only the dog’s and my enjoyment. Tomorrow morning, I’ll walk the dog like any other day, discussing weather with silver-haired walkers or other random strangers; in the afternoon, I’ll catch tea and a movie in Boston. The world is not a lonely place, I trust, when you believe with Wallace Stevens in the

…comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven

When viewed in such a light, isn’t any morning a sacred Sunday or blessed Christmastime?

It’s December 23, and we’ve yet to have a measurable snowfall here in Keene, NH. The powdered-sugar dusting we got in early December doesn’t count: it wasn’t deep enough to shovel, and it melted within a day. Although I appreciate having a good rainy day for today’s stint of online grading catch-up, it would be nice to have snow rather than rain at some point in December.

When I culled photos for my 2007 photo-calendar, I made a point to choose a nice snowy scene for the month of December. At this point, I’m already thinking ahead to next year’s calendar, when I fear I’ll have no December images of fresh snowy scenes. Somehow, the thought of facing the holidays while staring for a calendar month at a overcast shot of raindrop-dotted rosehips just doesn’t say “festive” to me.

This is my contribution for yesterday’s Photo Friday theme, Weather. Although it’s too late to buy my 2007 photo-calendar for Christmas, surely you know someone who’d appreciate a New Year’s gift?

Yesterday the swans at Lake Waban were uncooperative, dipping their heads under water whenever I tried to photograph them from shore. Luckily, plants aren’t as shy as swans, and the greenhouse at Wellesley College is full of photogenic Old World pitcher plants with their slippery, insect-luring lips.