silent spirits

Sun spots, pole shift, spies, global warming, aliens? NM just broke it's 70-year record for rainfall yesterday. It rained heavily toward morning and has been raining all day. Three people in Boulder, Colorado died in floods from a "30 foot wall of water with debris [cars] in it" (according to The Albuquerque News).

I wrote my blog earlier today and when I tried to save and publish it, it disappeared forever. Then I drove into town with the netbook that was recently cured of a nasty malware virus and is now not connecting to the server and discovered my cell phone wasn't working.

works in progress
I'm not going to try to recreate the lost blog that was a preview of the personal essay I'm writing on photography, vintage and otherwise. Just some notes and pictures from it.

Edward Weston in Lamy, NM, 1941...photo by Ernest Knee, print by Dana Knee. Part of my collection and traded with Dana, several years ago, for a handknit sweater. It's beginning to go sepia at the edges.

The album I kept as a ten year old that still survives with photos that haven't faded the way digital prints do now.

Meanwhile the oldest of the old photos are just beginning to fade after almost 100 years. 100 years! I have to save them somehow.

Black and white and sepia. What my world is today. I come from a photography-oriented family. My father's darkroom in the 1950's, my brother's 35mm, my Brownie Hawkeye, my mother's touch with Marshall photo oils. What camera did they use, I wonder, for the photos that were taken of my mother, her siblings and friends, on the beach at Throgs Neck in the Bronx -- she always told me they had "innocent fun" with the boys. Played forfeit games (read: kissing games) under the trees. If you knew my mother when I knew her, you'd find this hard to believe. But she is the pretty smiling one, second in from the right, c. 1920 or so.

And my 19 year old father ~ always a dashing car guy....his last conscious breaths were taken in his car sixty-six years later....

and the rain falls upon my door
So grateful for the rain yet wondering if this portends heavy snow for winter. Decide not to think about it. What will be, will be. As with everything in life. It's all very confusing to have one's assumptions turned upside-down. September and most of October are always the most perfect months here and the dire predictions about serious turns of events coming soon, begins to feel possible.

   And it all vanished back inside
like a soap bubble in the wind.
              Antonio Machado