september again

A fine Sunday, playing with my new camera. It is a Panasonic Lumix G and even though I've had it for a few weeks and have experimented with settings (mostly auto and manual), I only began exploring the image effects today. So now I'm hooked on taking highly saturated (by choice) photos. In this season when the air seems naturally color-saturated, it's double the fun.

So many things to be sad, joyful and grateful for these days. The weather, health, the color yellow, love, family visits to NM, the camera, my upcoming visit back east with family and friends, followed by a long writing retreat to complete the final edits on the manuscript I planned to work on starting in January. The plan that was derailed due to life interfering. Funny how that happens. And not necessarily funny.

homage to Barbara...and then there were three...
I learned two days ago that an old friend unexpectedly passed. I'd been planning to see her in a couple of weeks in Connecticut. I knew she was ailing since I'd last seen her in July 2013, but she was holding her own at home and planning to buy a new wardrobe for her grandson's barmitzvah at the end of this month. When our first sons, now in their 50's were toddlers, they played together.  We were all newly married, living in the same garden apartment building in NY and became best friends. Our second sons (now in their late 40s) were best friends when we all lived in the same town in CT. Barbara inspired many of the paths I chose over the decades that altered my life's direction. But most of all I remember the endless summer days when she and I and three other women friends sat in a circle in our sand chairs on Bailey Beach in Rowayton and had our own consciousness raising sessions (otherwise known as bitching and dreaming) while our kids (a dozen in all) played in various configurations around us. Gayle, who moved to Taos around the time we did, and whom I've written about, was one of those women. She left us four years ago. Her daughter recalled those beach days and said: it was the original Sex in the City! How true. We were all young and attractive and it was the early 1970's after all! I intend to visit Bailey Beach when I'm back there. I'm sure the sand is still imprinted with the circle of our chairs.

Barbara Kiley Posner 1935-2014