Monthly Archives: June 2014
Repay you for the years
The late sun caught this sign* on the western edge of the town of Sundown, a fitting sentence, maybe, for a rainy weekend in the midst of great drought.
Sundown,Texas
photographed 5.24.2014
*It’s Biblical – Joel 2:25. In case you wondered. Full disclosure: I Googled it; it wasn’t something I just knew.
(You can see other photos from the Day of Driving and Photographing here, here, and here.)
This didn’t end well
There’d been a fire at this house; we could tell that much. Judging from the chunks of previously-molten glass and the one piece of aluminum that had melted into a silvery pancake, it was a hot fire. (Aluminum melts at 1,221 degrees, I found out later). Almost nothing remained to give us any clues about what rooms had been where (a pile of broken china might have shown us where the dining room was, but who could tell?) or how big or how old the place might have been.
It’s in a remote part of a remote county, and internet searches didn’t reveal anything about when it happened, or why, or to whom.
We hope everyone made it out.
Cochran County, Texas
photographed 5.24.2014
(This is the third photo from the Day of Driving and Photographing. You can see the first one here and the second one here.)
20 pound graduations
Here’s the second shot from the Day of Driving and Photographing*.
We are four years in to a drought, but this weekend, we had rain so it was a muddy day. Getting to this place meant carefully plotting a path to skirt the worst of a huge mud puddle. It was worth it, though, to get to see this old set of scales – marked in twenty pound graduations – in the now-abandoned office next to the grain elevator. (In case you can’t imagine a grain elevator, here’s what this one looks like.)
County Line, Texas
photographed 5.24.2014
It was all yellow
We spent the day driving around with some friends – those rare kinds of friends who really don’t mind if you want to stop approximately every seven minutes to take a picture of something you saw beside the road. I’ve written about this before, about feeling rushed when you’re with people who are used to your peculiar ways, and how it can have a negative impact on your work. But these friends got it and didn’t mind stopping – in fact, they encouraged it. And, even better: they suggested some places to go that they thought I’d like.
This was one of their suggestions, and it was a treasure of visuals. Like this room, that used to be even more yellow than the way I saw it.
Check back for more shots from the Day of Driving and Photographing.
Lubbock County, Texas
photographed 5.24.2014
Urban forest (sort of)
If a “forest” can be defined as “a group of five or more trees within a metropolitan area” then I guess this might qualify. Even though it’s really just some elm trees that came up on their own – the way elms do – and no one did anything about it. And now, they’re big enough and close enough to the building that there’s probably some foundation damage. But I don’t think anyone cares about that, either.
Roswell, New Mexico
photographed 5.10.2014
One Day | One Image 