i've got more shots of stuff i saw during last weekend's trip to mom's. to make up for the gross snakes and stark oil light, here's a bunch of pretty things. nothing too deep or real...

on the whole, the place is looking very good... grass is greening, most trees are golding, redbuds are redding (but, drat, i didn't get any shots of them... i noticed a really fine one over by athens on my drive back, but... i was on the road at that point)

i wandered out on sunday morning and caught those snakes napping, but i also found a few flowers... like the elegant narcissus

and the lowly dandelion

...which reminds me that we up here in lake county haven't yet received our fair allotment of this early sign of spring. down in menard county they've got big blooming fields of this momentarily gorgeous weed.

then, out in the front yard right where it's most likely to be trampled, i stumbled onto the rare grape hyacinth. it's a puny flower... i had to get real close for this shot, which is three or four times larger than reality...

couldn't keep from noticing the neighbors' fancy new look, which includes this exotic purple number (some kind of rhododendron?)

god bless neighbors with extravagant landscaping budgets...

during this photo-safari i also had cause to note some not-quite-natural scenes. the plane geometry of the dock pleased my eye...

taylor, looking at this and a few others that follow, said something like...

"tom..."

"what."

"you take pictures of weird things."

i'm patient with her, since she is young and hasn't studied the masters of modern photography. i, on the other hand, have... so (blinded forever by education) i can only see through their eyes... look... a brick...

look... a bobber... some algae... some water... some clouds...

look... some free-standing toilet paper...

i've never seen anything like this, and yet... when i saw it for the first time i felt as if i had been seeing it forever... a classic. mom and meg have been overhauling the upstairs bathroom... as you may note from this shot, the floor is not quite done, but the fixtures are in... and they are very classy... what else would you expect from two such very classy chicks? (i made a point on sunday to pass some time on the sparkly new toilet just so i could practice moving the t. p. stand from here to there and back again... o brave new world that hath such accessories in it)

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

Henry David Thoreau

 

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