Fun with Holga

I recently picked up a new Holga camera. These cameras are cheap plastic medium format film cameras that are well known for vignetting and light leaks.

Farewell Portland

Sou and I woke up early to pick up our moving truck. We picked up the our truck but Penske didn't have the car carrier. No bother, we headed home and loaded up the truck and cleaned the apartment.

When we arrived back at Penske, the still didn't have the car carrier. Fortunately, Penske (thanks Joyce!) offered to pay for our lunch while we waited for the carrier. So we enjoyed lunch at a Hawaiian restaurant on Sandy before getting our car loaded and heading out of Portland.

Harvest

By Louise Glück from A Village Life

It's autumn in the market—
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They're beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—

Inside, they're gone. Black, moldy—
you can't take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.

Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.

Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.

At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.

The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground's so hard the farmers think
it isn't worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?

And then the frost comes; there's no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.


_______________________________________________

The days are growing short, leaves litter the ground, the rains have come again. It's time to migrate to warmer climes!