I took this photograph of a meadow at Squire Valleevue Farm in Hunting Valley, the morning of July 26, exactly nine years ago today. My intent was to convey the sense of impermanence through the soft weight of the morning mist. Hanging like a veil, diffusing light, waiting to be transformed, it held the faint, sweet scent of nostalgia, “saudade” from another culture. Timothy grass added its own dimension, erect like sentries with heads tightly wrapped, were sided by earthbound constellations of Queen Anne’s Lace and the season’s first aster panicles, their blue-violet flowers bending east to a new day.
Beyond the meadow’s perimeter the “ee-oh-lay” of the wood thrush mixed with the irrepressible bubbling joy of bobolinks, the last wave to migrate still nesting beneath the grasses. And redwing blackbirds, songs at once bright and disconsolate chiming insistently. Bird songs of every season exalting the sacred.