I wonder what it says about the balance of one’s life when there is more hotchpotch than coherent substance?
Still life waiting to happen
I have a lineup of bottles on my kitchen windowsill. The plan was to spend 5 minutes photographing them in different configurations and light, but my arrangements always look stilted, and since they are glass I can’t throw them towards a random arrangement, and hope.
A joke
Look closely at the base of the trig at the high point in my village. Maybe you’ll be quicker than I was to spot the joke.
Fallen woman
I continue to practise floral and foliage kleptomania on my early morning strolls, although the leaves on gravel are fair game since they lie on a public road.
Fallen blossom
High on the crown of the eucalypts – the dark pink one opposite my place, the paler one on the corner a few doors down – are blossoms. I know I will never reach them, either with my arm or with my eye extension which is my camera. But then, as time passes, they carpet the ground and all I have to do is crouch down for an intimate view. Colour difference is the result of two different cameras and two different species.
Piling up
The beach is usually pristine and the creek pool just before the rocks pellucid, tempting small children to flop and paddle and play. Over this holiday period the beach has been piled high with rotting seaweed and the creek an infective black, where no child plays. Just occasionally a coil or a spray of seaweed separates itself from the suppurating mass.
Elemental
Early morning perchers, swallows preening and fluffing on the wires, graceful creatures of the air. A taped off area on Brou Beach to protect nesting Little Terns in their earth-bound phase from unwary clodhoppers. A pair of emus grazing along the sand-cliffs, leaving their startled footprints when we move too close, forever birds of the earth. An unperturbed egret, fishing in the dark waters of Potato Creek, at home in air and water. Fire, you may ask? That too, close to home. Bodalla school crest features a phoenix rising from the flames.
Left behind
The beach is full of things left behind: the sea must be far more forgetful than me. It recedes and leaves shells, weed, sand grains, ripple marks. When it returns, it carelessly eradicates them all under its waves and its foam. Occasionally things people leave behind escape its attention, and very occasionally it returns what it has taken. We once found a jumper of J’s matted and salt-laden a year after he left it on the beach.
Prospect
On an empty block, a lowslung chair has taken up residence in front of a potential barbecue frame. It lounges there taking in the view over the grasses and up the beach towards Tuross.
A weekend of death …
On Brou Beach and in Brou Lake things out of place and dying, if not already dead. A cicada on a vast stretch of sand, and a jellyfish imprisoned in the lake. Overhead at the river a cicada shriek overhead – doomed in the beak of a bird. At home the front yard hakea crashing harmlessly over the drive where there could’ve been people, cars, dogs.
… and maybe resurrection
The tree in the Brou camping area is spouting new growth. I photograph it with J’s camera. Mine is awaiting either resurrection or a death sentence, after collecting a pile of sand and seawater when I inexplicably fell over on the edge of the sea.
If it wasn’t for having to be at work for 7.5 hours a day my life would be total hotchpotch, and if this is what hotchpotch can bring, then I can’t wait!
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Work certainly interferes with life! I’ve just returned to my post-retirement pleasure in watching the sun rise.
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Big potato masher?
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With a potato awaiting it!
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Nice collection of ‘things’. Love the bottles: I have a love of glass in all its shapes and forms and have quite a collection of Murano glass and a lot of Swedish and Finnish glass. On sunny days the light coming through them is such a delight.
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Your glass is much classier than mine. I’ve got a pecks paste bottle, an old ink bottle, and a laboratory flask. Mundane!
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Another beguiling hotchpotch! 🙂 🙂 No I couldn’t magnify enough to spot the joke but I love the elephant. Outta here or I’ll be late for t’ai chi hugs 🙂
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I’ve added a closeup. Do you get the joke now??
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Thank heavens for Rosemary 🙂 🙂
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But I love hotch-potch! (or however one spells it) Surely that is the essence of life. My favourite glass shot is the single clear bottle, with … um, something small … either in or just behind it. And the things I learn, in this hotch-potch: I didn’t know about eucalyptus blooms, or an emu footprint in sand. That emu-footprint trail is pure magic.
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Emus are proliferating here. I just checked the bottle. It has a curtain runner safely stored in it!!! Check out WA eucalypt flowers for a real extravaganza. That’s how I do broad flora ID, especially orchids: if it’s spectacular it comes, counter-intuitively, from the depleted soils of WA
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Ouch! I fear for that camera. Sand and sea water is not a good combination. As for your bottles you need to take a leaf out of Sue’s book and add some other interesting items with just one or two bottles, leaves, feathers, a book, some of those shells and other random things? As to the joke. No I haven’t got it. I see an egg…
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It’s a potato! Camera about to be dispatched to Sony for diagnosis.
May fiddle with the bottles as you suggest (all those items to
hand), but I fear that stiffness will prevail, or excessive order.
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Ah! Well if I could have seen that then I’d get the joke 🙂 Good luck with the camera and the still life. Just chuck it all on a table and see how it falls 🙂
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We did an Edna Walling (Australian landscape gardener) and chucked potatoes (potatoes again!) to plant out the front yard randomly – and then moved them to more ordered positions!
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A bit like we do with spring bulbs!
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Interesting tour again. Especially about the left behind cardigan or whatever and I liked the elephant in the sand. As always, your detailed commentary.
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Sounds like a very pleasant hotch potch of rambling through the days.
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I do love your visual/mental wanderings, Meg….makes me feel better for having what an ex-colleague referred to as a ‘butterfly mind’…. 😳😊
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I like the idea of a butterfly mind. Transformative!
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Hmm…I don’t think that was the view of my colleague!!
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