An Easter postcard, being at the New Moon, and other joys
April 9, 2023
A tango of shooting stars
To those of you who celebrate Easter, Happy Easter.
Apart from the liturgy of the resurrection, my grandmother Marie’s lavish dinners in Gamboa, and the Connor family Easter egg hunts (as raucous and bruising as the Omak Stampede), Easter has always been about the flowers. Not to slight the buttercups, grass widows, and crocuses that are gamely popping up now and brushing off the ice, but I’m going with a mix of shooting stars for the Easter postcard. They’ll be here, shortly, in actual form. They just have an Easter-look to them and their dancing collisions remind me of the Connor Easter scrums, especially when the Kennon boys dropped by to join the wrestling for the golden egg.
I have so many people to thank for getting me through one of the most difficult winters I’ve experienced, what with the theft of my cameras, the disastrous fire, and other events that bounced my chin on the floor. I’m still trying to rebound from all of that, so I’ve really enjoyed the old and new friends I’ve been able to chat with the past couple days hanging out at Spokane’s New Moon Art Gallery. Some of my more exotic nature photography will be on display, there, for the next month along with a dwindling stack of my book, Beautiful Wounds. It’s just been a delight to be invited to offer my work there, and the community of artists at the gallery have been incredibly warm and helpful. While I’m here, thanks to all of you who’ve signed on or upgraded to The Daily Rhubarb as paying subscribers. Your support has been is a real godsend, for which I’m deeply grateful.
As it happens I was out photographing nuthatches Friday morning, and when I got to my space at the New Moon I soon noticed a beautiful painting of a red-breasted nuthatch in the corner right across from my photographs. The work is entitled The Notorious RBN—by Sheila Evans. It’s hard to capture the charisma and beauty of a bird (or a larger critter) in one image, but her painting does that so well. It immediately lifted my spirits, and that reaffirms what art can do. So, here it is (in a photo I took with my phone) above a photo of an RBN I took earlier that day (with my SLR) in Riverside State Park. I like the juxtaposition of the poses.
By coincidence the New Moon exhibition was installed the same day the weekly Pacific Northwest Inlander published my cover story, Beneath Our Feet. The April 6th edition of the paper in which the story appears will be on newsstands for the next few days, so there’s still time to pick up a paper copy (it’s free).
Finally, it’s been eleven months since Beautiful Wounds was released and I’ve done at least seven book-related appearances in Spokane in that time, and hope to do more. In the meantime, I do have upcoming events out and about, including in Seattle, the evening of April 19th at the Patagonia store near Pike Place Market. We’ll have books there, of course, and I’ll do my slide-show thing. Better yet, if anything goes wrong my intrepid daughter will be there to fix it, or fix me, or both.
Enjoy the rest of your day and week. I’ll leave you with the 8-minute video, Scablands Dawn to Dusk with its natural noises from some of my favorite places, and animals, out there. The last scene, a surreal sunset on a vernal marsh, is prayer-like in it’s serenity.
I’m taking tomorrow off, but will return, here, in a day or two. Thank you again for your interest in my photography and my stories. Hope to see you on the trails this spring. Blessings to you and your families.
—tjc