Author Archives: Melinda Green Harvey
Dish Cupboard
Y’all, I did a thing. It’s a thing that’s not as far outside my comfort zone as it used to be but that’s still not a thing I can do without sort of having to talk myself into it.
The thing I did was to go inside the Historic Rocksprings Hotel and have a chat with the owner. I wasn’t staying there or anything – I was passing through town and decided to stop and look at the place. She was perfectly lovely, and let me take photos, and I lived to tell about it. Amazing! And I might even do something like this again; you just never know.
Here’s the dish and cookbook sections of the kitchen that’s on the back of the first floor. There’s not a restaurant – just a big kitchen with lots of pots and pans and dishes and guests are encouraged to prepare their own meals.
Rocksprings, Texas
photographed 1.28.2022
Hymnals, with dust
“It’s open – you just got to turn the knob real hard to the left,” a kindly woman hollered at me from her house across the street.
And that’s how I got to see these hymnals.
Roosevelt, Texas
photographed 1.28.2022
defies explanation
I ended up in this tiny town because there was an unfortunate sign out on the highway that I wanted to photograph (although I will not dignify its message by posting a photo), and while I was at it, I went ahead and checked out the town. And that’s how I happened to see a weather-worn sign for a gun sale and a dinosaur in the same spot.
It was practically my lucky day.
Ackerly, Texas
photographed 1.27.2022
Café
+My mom’s family reunions were always held in this little town on the banks of a nice river. It was a thing for many years (even though we only went one time) and the very name of the town – Christoval – can conjure up manufactured memories of reunions on a riverbank. You may have actual memories of family reunions, and I may be way off base with what I think I missed: watermelon; home made ice cream; the aunts sitting together and smoking and gossiping; the uncles sitting together somewhere else smoking and gossiping (but they’d just call it “talking” because surely gossip is something only women do); cousins running and squealing and playing in the river; sunburns; and chiggers and mosquitoes.
I was driving through Christoval recently and decided to get off the highway and look around. Nothing I saw seemed like anything I’d ever seen before – no actual family-reunion memories surfaced or anything like that. This old café, with its hollow promise of “home cooked meals,” seemed sort of symbolic of the place, both as it is now and as it stands in my memory.
So you know what I did…
Christoval, Texas
photographed 1.27.2022
Sunset Angels
I live on the very western edge of the Central time zone, where a December 21 sunset is at 5:44 pm. I failed to account for Nashville’s location – in the very eastern edge of the same time zone – and was therefore surprised at the 4:36 sundown. It cut into my first afternoon of photographing the city. But it also let me see this cemetery sunset. So, really, it all worked out.
Calvary Cemetery
Nashville, Tennessee
photographed 12.21.2021
One Day | One Image 