A Silver Linings Photographic Update

Dear Friends:

Some weeks ago I posted an essay on the well-worn subject of silver linings. My thesis was far from original. At 60 years old, I’m finding that daily detours, interruptions and adjustments lead me to unexpected blessings. Part of the dynamic I described was all of the physical detours I have to take to make it, for example, from the house to my writing hut.

What follows is a photographic update of what blocks my path during this hot, humid August–which, by the way, makes all of wife Kathy’s plants grow as if on steroids. I’ll include a few bonus photographs just because and close with a short, lesson-learned coda.

Love, John

CODA: LESSON LEARNED

Kathy and I live in Erie, Pennsylvania, a few blocks from Lake Erie in a middle class neighborhood. These amateur photographs taken on a smartphone show what seems to me an embarrassment of blessings. I have shelter, clothing, more than enough food and drink–trust me, blossoms and birds to please my eyes, and most of all love. I look out from the hut, which itself would not exist but for the COVID pandemic, and think to myself, “John, you’re in paradise.”

As I try to settle into what I hope will continue to be a charmed stretch of years, I realize that paradise has as much to do with what all I carry into it than what pictures can show. Gladness is work, regardless of how many people I love and the riot of color out my window. Like anybody else, I might at one moment be stunned by the brilliance of a red-headed woodpecker or a delicacy of a cosmos, but then remember an injury or disappointment sleeping in my chest, awakening unpredictably by its own volition.

So, I guess what I’m driving at is this: Silver linings, breathtaking as they are, don’t drive away the iron gray clouds. They abide together. At least they do for me.

Love (again), John