Thursday, March 21, 2019
Preserving the Fall :: Personal Narrative Nature Seasons Papers
Preserving the Fall Starts with a photograph, a frame of reference. Steve seems late meditative, sitting cross-legged, hands exploring some invisible blade of grass, plucking some wild flower blossom from its stem. Eyes downcast, content, absorbed in this task of dissecting nature, shredding it. Curved behind, temperateness painted onto the sleeve of his sweater, the sweater I borrowed to go hiking in the Sierras, twain of our knobby joints contributing to its decay around the elbows, gray, true to its color fifty-fifty in black and white. He was warm that day, I imagine. The background pith Runthe largely unexplored natural area of Newark, DEagain. It is a content here, used in some months to grow straw, but is flanked by forest, contained by it. I would ceaselessly come here on Sunday afternoons, looking for for adventure, recruiting one or two friends to be the subject of my photography. I never tired of this game, of making the hike to that hidden field, of placing people in that context, snuggled among bales of hay, stiff grass, those horizons, sudden leaps from sky to straw, straw to trees. Transitions. Changes. Weekend to weekday, human to nature, late(prenominal) to future. The cornfields there remain unexplored territory. I understand that they are soften of an experiment, that the University of Delaware agricultural science department studies these plants genes, breeds them, cross-pollinates. They hope to find the perfect chaff of corn, the highest yielding, the most nutritious kernels. I too must experiment, must assay out something of greater quality.Certain seasons find the corn healthy, tall and strong. Productive. They conk out this place a consciousness of life, hope. At other times, only wilted stalks remain, consumed by the threat of decay, crackling the sounds of death, of loss and cold beneath heavily traipsing feet. This many dead plants are arresting, an assault to the visual sense and sense of gravity, of time, one I would like to capture in a photograph. I have come to this place in all seasons, have throw snowballs, run barefoot in the grass here. But I always picture it in Fall, associate it with cyclical death. It is strange to love, to come back to this time the most, strange to find solace in the thoughts of leaves falling, disintegrating, of declining temperatures, shortening days, and the grievous emptiness of the suddenly and awkwardly naked forest.
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