The 21st Century Matriarch

Sometimes I get in the mood for macro photography. It has happened several times this month.

The first was at my mother’s funeral. I was thinking about the bouquet of daffodils/narcissus that her neighbor cut from their old yard (with the new owner’s permission) and decided to take some macro views of the flowers while we were waiting for the service to begin. I thought about all the joy my mother experienced with her garden…with the flowers growing there and the ones she cut to bring inside. And that she transmitted that joy to her daughters.

The second round of macro photography was when I trimmed some low branches from one of my pine trees and decided to take a closer look at one of the branches.

Pine cones are so sturdy….they are hard on my lawn mower…but there is a fragile aspect to them too. At close range they are wrinkled and folded and etched.

The bark on a small stem shows where needles once grew and the expansion of the stem making brown islands in gray green.nce.

The bud at the end of stem looks reddish surrounded by green needles. Once again – I realize how much color there is that is unnoticed until we take a closer look.

The last macro photograph is one my daughter sent via text when she visited the Memphis Botanic Garden recently. She knows how much I enjoy finding fiddleheads….and evidently had caught the macro photography bug too. These were interesting because of the felt-like covering that must have protected them until they started to unfurl.

We opted to drive to Maryland one last time…for the closing on the house there and last goodbyes to some favorite places. We started out shortly after 6:30 AM for the two-day drive – with a much longer drive on the 1st day. The first stop from Springfield was the Route 66 rest stop along I-44 near Conway. Our route was the interstate along the old Route 66 until St. Louis.

It was sunny and hot for most of the day – traversing Illinois and Indiana and most of Kentucky. The only big cities on the route were St. Louis and Louisville. We stopped in Ashland, KY for the night; we had driven out of the hot and dry Midwest and into rain. The last rest stop of the day (in Kentucky) was one that included oak leaf hydrangeas in their landscaping…reminding me that I want to plant one or two in my new yard.

The next day it rained…and rained. Most was not too heavy and did not delay us as we travelled through West Virginia and into Maryland. It did change the type of photography is did at the rest stops I switched to macro photography– lichen, moss, buds, insect, shelf fungus. I took several pictures from inside the car (since I wasn’t driving). Sidling Hill is more interesting from the highway than the eastward rest stop!