Home?

I went home last weekend, a bit of a misnomer because I never lived on the beach when I was a boy, and while the neighborhood is where I grew up, I haven't really lived there--save a two-year sojourn, 1980-82--since 1966. You do the math.

So whether or not I can call home "home" anymore, we'll let the sociologists determine. Meanwhile, I'm not shying away from saying it because it rises to my heart without apology: "I went home last weekend, home to Wisconsin"--and yes, we bought cheese, sausage, and beer. 

That cabin above is the place we rented, newly remodeled--and splendidly, I might add--but small and ancient, by cottage standards. I'm sure it's been there for years, but it was greatly comfortable and, well, downright gezellech (a Dutch word--I'm not sure of its spelling) which means just plain fingers-laced-across-the-belly goed. 

As you can see, our little abode stands right smack dab on the lakefront, so close that a line of gargantuan rocks, piled four feet high just a bit east, kept the cabin from floating out to sea some time ago when the lake was high. 

I started messing around with photography when I still lived "home," so it's fair to say I've been taken by what kind of beauty can be captured in a camera for a long time. A cottage on the lake let me greet the dawn--and get what I could of sheer beauty through a lens. 

We arrived back home in the middle of a beautiful April day--February to be exact-- temps in the 50s, windless for the most part, clear skies, so sweet a day that looking out over Lake Michigan the next morning didn't seem a whole lot different than watching the sun rise on a fair-to-middlin' farm pond. At dawn, it seemed only as if some almighty hand had spilled orange juice over most of the world.

I started messing around with photography when I still lived "home," so it's fair to say I've been taken by what kind of beauty can be somehow captured in a camera for a long, long time. A cottage on the lake gave me the opportunity to greet the dawn--and get what I might be lucky to find into a camera. 

All the while I waited that morning for the sun to rise, that dark belt of something or other out there was slowly advancing, east to west, a weather pattern we rarely see. It was notable only because it broke up what might have been an orange sea. And, it offered it's own kind of pleasure. The shot below is with a 150mm zoom lens out. Still, the thing seemed a little ominous, a broad, dark curtain rising, strangely, from the stage floor.

When the sun finally came up--6:30 or so--it had to climb above what now, clearly seemed a cloud bank that suggested--and so said the weatherman--that April would be fleeting for us. February was returning. 

See those rocks at the bottom edge? By later that afternoon, I was happy they were there. Conditions had changed. The big lake was flexing its muscles. 

In a day, we fell back a couple months in weather and charged forward through ten thousand syllables of noise.

***** more "home" tomorrow