Impression: Finger Lakes

There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;     
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
Walt Whitman, There Was a Child Went Forth, from Leaves of Grass

My most recent project is a little photo book that I am making about the house and property where we live. I bought the house in May of 2004, but I did not purchase a digital camera until February of 2010. So it turns out that the photographic story of the earlier years of the house (2004 to early 2010) lives within the printed photos included in the 60-or-so photo albums sitting in our living room.

So over this past weekend, I went through the last 10 or so albums, looking for pictures of the early years of the house. Many of the photos in the albums (including this one) were taken using my pre-digital SLR, the Pentax K-1000, which was my main go-to camera from about 1986 to 2010.

These hands have been holding a camera ever since I was deemed old enough to do so responsibly by my parents, and able to pay for my own film and photo development. My maternal grandfather was a photographer who owned his own studio, and my mother helped out when she was a girl at home. So having a camera was just a taken-for-granted kind of thing. And so there are lots and lots of pictures in the archives.

I have often thought about trying to digitize the best of the best of them, but I fear I don't know the optimal path forward to accomplish that, I don't have the proper equipment and tools, and I don't really have the time right now. (Maybe a project for after retirement?) So I settled - short-term - for identifying a few dozen shots that would suit my most immediate needs.

And then I photographed them using my current camera. Which I realize is probably not the best way to do it, but hey, it's what I've got for now. And of course, in addition to the house-and-property pictures I was seeking, I stumbled across others I had forgotten about. And I photographed some of them too.

It is my custom to post fresh photos here each day; however, I thought it fair to show you at least one of the archive photos on this day . . . (And hey, technically, it IS a fresh photo, for I took this photo of a photo TODAY.)

A quick bit of personal history. The man who is now my husband and I started dating 29 years ago this month. In the early years, we had nothing, but we made the most of it. We threw caution to the winds and, with very little money in our pockets, traveled up and down the east coast from Maine (where I attended a conference in Augusta while he climbed Mount Katahdin; and then we both headed over to Acadia) to Florida (where for a week and a half each year right after Christmas, we hiked in the national forests and camped on the beaches and swam in the crystal-clear springs). The evidence of our grand adventures lives on in those 60-some photo books. Oh, the sweet memories!

One of our favorite places in the world is the Finger Lakes of New York. They are about a four-hour drive from where we live in central Pennsylvania, and there are many wonderful things to see there. One of the nicest parks is Taughannock, not far from Ithaca. It boasts the highest waterfall of the Finger Lakes (at 215 feet, it is the tallest single-drop waterfall east of the Rockies), and the park is located conveniently on beautiful Lake Cayuga, which is the lake depicted in this photo.

Autumn is possibly my very favorite time of year. You have not seen a proper autumn until you have watched it unfold across the hills of Pennsylvania. Or the Finger Lakes, for that matter, where the lakes themselves act as mirrors, providing a fantastic reflective surface to double your foliage fun.

I have been thinking deep thoughts lately, about how to hold onto those things in life that are most important, that are most precious to me. Memory represents our reflections of the past, and desire represents our wishes and hopes for the future. The present lives smack-dab in the juncture between these two. We can enjoy remembering the past and looking forward to the future, but the only moment we can truly live in is the present moment, right now.

For myself, a key strategy for capturing the present and holding it still is taking pictures; lots of them, in fact. And so photography is one of my strategies for stopping time. I capture the moment. And then I place some of my favorite and most important moments here on Blip, to keep them safe.

And so I show you this picture of a moment captured in time, as I would rummage through a bag of toys and pull out a favorite. As Whitman says, what object we look upon each morning, that object we become. So if I show you what I've seen, I tell you something about who I am.

I don't know what year it was in this picture. I can't tell you the date, or what we did next. But I know that it is an autumn straight out of what autumn OUGHT to be. It is colorful at the middle and soft around the edges: a moment that would have faded into nothingness without a proper photograph to keep it in. The photograph itself seems now to be only an impression, really; not gone, but possibly fading, like a moment stolen out of a happy dream . . .

The song to accompany this image is Jim Croce, with Photographs and Memories.