the beauty of everyday things

Most of my life I have been a night owl. If I got to work at 9:00 a.m., it would be 11:00, if not noon, by the time my brain actually started moving at anything like the required speed and my most productive time was always in the late afternoon and into the evening.

Not anymore. Old turkey that I am getting to be, by 4:00, 4:30 p.m., with at least another hour left in my work day, I start losing concentration and making mistakes. So I step outside for a 10 minute break, to clear my head, think of something else. This time of year, with the autumn colors in the nearby park and the resident birds cleaning up the berries on the courtyard bushes, I find plenty of sights to divert my attention from work matters.

On this particular day, however, I had no sooner stepped outside that my photographer’s eye caught something that sent me scampering back upstairs. “That was a mighty short break ….” commented my colleague. I grabbed my camera out of my purse and promised to explain later. Light, you see, doesn’t leave you time for chit chat if you want to catch it at the right time.

What you see here is the deeply ridged driveway ramp that leads down to the underground garage at my work place. Just before setting below the nearby land features, the light from the sun was coming in at a low angle and illuminating only the very top of the ridges. A lone fallen leaf from a nearby tree, still in its pretty autumn livery, seemed to have chosen this particular spot as a final resting place, going out in style with a little help from the westering sun.

I am always thrilled by this kind of images, where mundane, everyday things turn out to have a claim to beauty. They remind me of the advice my art teacher father would obsessively give his students: “The subject matter of your best work will always be what you see around you everyday, the stuff you can picture in detail even with your eyes closed, that you know as intimately as the inside of your pockets.” As his students were rural kids, what they knew best were cows, chickens, barns, the woods, the mountains. They usually balked, at least at first, at this advice. “That’s boring stuff! “ they complained, “we want to draw interesting things, you know, stuff like spaceships, castles and unicorns, airplanes and race cars …”

But, of course, he was right: their pictures of far away places and things they knew little about lacked detail, were naive and even a bit ridiculous or at best commonplace. By contrast, an oil painting by one of his students, featuring a maze of ink-black, intricate tree boles in the woods, with leaves in lurid colors that seemed to be flying in your face, was for years the centre piece on our living room wall. It had a dark, ominous quality that told the story of an adventure turned dangerous, of having wandered too deep into the woods and lost your way, of a familiar place turned scary when a storm hid the sun and plunged it in darkness. To this day, I still see that painting clearly in my mind’s eye.