Coffee and Contemplating

It’s not often I wake to an empty house, but today when I crawled out of bed the house was quiet, except for a whisper of a meow at my door. Manda is off with two friends searching for a wedding gown and bride’s maid dresses in Cincinnati and Redding spent the night with Grandpa leaving me home alone for an evening and a morning.

After feeding an insistent Miss Adventure, along with her cat-horts, Anime and Mr. Noodle, I started coffee and then jumped in the shower. I sat at the table, sipping on coffee with a spanking new notebook and pen at my fingertips. I don’t know if it was the quiet or the rumbling in my stomach that diverted my plan to journal, but I never wrote a word. Instead, I scrambled an egg, buttered a slice of toast, and ate breakfast contemplating a new and exciting discovery.

While sipping milky coffee in my favorite Chicago mug, I came to realize that this blog has brought something new and wonderful to my life. The Cottage on the Corner gave me a gift, a passion that until the last few months I didn’t know existed. Taking photographs exhilarates me.

Art has always been near and dear to my heart. Through the masterpieces of others, I’ve peered into the world of drawing, painting, sculpting, and photography. I cannot draw with charcoal…I cannot paint with oils…flowers and herbs have been my medium. I painted gardens, borders, and beds with soft petals, jagged-edged leaves, and flowing branches. I conjured up stories using flowers in traditional, modern, and abstract floral design. Now I am adding one more medium to my artistic palette, photography. It combines two passions into one…story telling and painting with the world as my muse. It’s wordless storytelling captured in a moment. Blink and the moment escapes. My perspective on the world opened like a flower when I looked through the lens, my heart beating a little faster, and snapped the picture. I’m a novice for sure. I have no fancy equipment, no wide-angle lenses, filters, or expensive photo manipulation programs. I just have two green eyes that view the world in a brand new way…through a point and shoot, digital Fuji camera.

Photography has eased the hurt of not having my own garden. Yes, I am a gardenless gardener and like Mary in the Secret Garden, I long for a bit of earth to plant flowers. Because my next garden plot exists somewhere in the future, I followed my brother and his wife as they took a giant step into the world of gardening; I visit gardens, search for nature everywhere and take photos along the way, offering my viewpoint as tiny treasures that enhance my blog. After six months of grabbing moments out of thin air, I’ve embraced photography like a new lover…shy, with a quivering hand, yet flush with excitement threatening to spill over into a full-blown love affair.

As I take my last sip of coffee, I contemplate all the wonderful gifts The Cottage on the Corner has brought to me…exchanging ideas with people from faraway places, viewing the perspectives of so many other gardeners who share their worlds through the camera lens, reading opinions, heart-felt musings from kindred spirits, and this joyous new-found love, photography. I have no idea where this little blog will take me next, but I’m overwhelmed by where it’s taken me thus far.

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”

~Ansel Adams