Monica posted on August 06, 2008 08:11 :: 3722 Views
I can be seduced. I often am.
It happened again just last month. I was on my way back to the paper from an interview in Silver Bay, and there in front of me was a big, beautiful, bold sky full of the most glorious clouds. They rose in mountainous formations, beefy and imposing, having worked out in some heavenly gym.
So, I cruised by the house like someone avoiding a paparazzi ambush, and headed straight for the breakwater. The stories I had to write could wait. The clouds had a come-hither look I couldn’t resist. They flirted with me and I fell for every line. An hour later I headed home, camera full of memories.
It’s not burliness alone that catches my eye, however. A few weeks before the cloud episode, I was in the woods with two friends, looking for an old, old copper mine. The guys walked ahead, looking for “sign.” I trailed along behind, looking for my own kind of sign. I wasn’t quite sure what it would be, but I knew it would call to me when the time was right.
It did. I swear, it winked at me. Oh, there’s nothing quite so enticing as a wild wood violet, hunkered down close to the ground, playing hard-to-get. I dropped to my knees, and then to my belly, despite the fact that it had rained not long ago, and this was pretty spongy terrain. I looked at it, eye to eye, and felt my heart beat fast.
Behind me, I heard a cleared throat. Oops, it’s not nice to two-time your dance partners. I offered explanations, lame excuses about flowers and a tiny red mite and “there’s a worm here, too.” When I heard a chuckle, I knew I’d been forgiven. But before I got up, I’d taken my shots.
Two weeks ago, though, I fell really hard. It was the love-at-first-site sort of encounter, the kind that leaves you a bit dazed, daydreaming about the time when you can ditch the crowds and just get alone and get acquainted.
It was a pond. A half-wild, half-tame sort of pond, with a mowed approach and a ragged boundary. It was decked out with wildflowers along one side, cattails on the other. Someone had added a bridge to an island, the final invitation to intimacy. I started making plans as soon as I saw it.
No harsh, tasteless mid-day tryst for this newest paramour. This one deserved early morning, with pale golden light from a barely risen sun, and birdsong accompaniment. Freshly showered with dew around the edges, it awaited, beckoning with unspoken promise.
No part of it was unworthy of a closer look. Beauty lay in every direction--long shadows from a low-slung sun; a glass-still surface creating mirror images of whatever hovered near, twice the charm with but one glance. Banjo frogs plucked their one-note songs, each note different from each other’s, staying coyly out of sight.
Any successful seduction means paying attention to the details. I did. I couldn’t help it; they were offered with such joyful hope. Only twice did I pan; the rest of the time I pulled in, getting close and closer, isolating the parts of the whole, giving each its due.
I got lost for a time in a daisy’s eye. I gazed with wonder at lupine seed pods, white-whiskered with their own kind of age. I let a tree trunk take center stage, and looked closer at a clover than I do my own face in a mirror.
And always, always, I returned to the pond, lying still and breathless, revealing nothing within its depths, only reflecting the world that circled it and held it close.
We whispered together, that pond and I, while the sun slowly ascended, gilding first the tree tops, and then sliding sensuously lower and lower, waking up the shadows. As the sun rose, so did a tiny breeze, gaining strength with passing moments, tossing pesky mosquitoes end for end. It brushed tender fingers across the pond’s silky surface, causing a quiver that gently turned real-life images into Monet-like renderings.
It was time to go. If a camera could steam, mine did. It had worked overtime, recording this rendezvous that begs to be repeated. Sunrise, fog, sunset, frost…We’ll meet again, this pond and I.
It has mastered the art of seduction.
Live Life Joyfully,
Monica Isley
View more of this author's photography.
Monica Isley is a former newspaper reporter/columnist/photographer who once stalked the Lake Superior shoreline in northeastern Minnesota, camera in hand. She now lives in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., where the summers are warmer and the winters are milder than she's used to, but where photographic prey is just as available. Besides this column for JustNorth, she writes a blog called Monica's Pen at http://monicaspen.wordpress.com/
Article Source:
http://justnorth.com/Articles/tabid/105/articleType/AuthorView/authorID/924/lablover47.aspx