Stories in the Mud

I don’t know what it is about this image, but it often pops randomly into my head   while I’m going about my day.

I took this image over ten years ago. It was amongst my first forays into the DSLR world. I didn’t even take it with my own camera.

While I was trying to decide whether or not I would invest in a DSLR camera, after being a stickler for my beloved film camera for close to two decades, a good friend loaned me his Nikon DSLR.

“Go play,” he said. So I did.

And I had a blast. This is one of the first images I took with that borrowed camera. It was on the trail at the end of the road where I live and the evening autumn light was illuminating things in that way that grabs me by the heart.

The fading rays of the sun spilled along the trail between the trees towards me as I wandered up the path, and everything looked interesting, everything was beautiful.

I can’t remember what caught my eye first, the warm glow of that leaf and the way it curled just so as though purposely catching the last of the daylight, or the surface texture of mud with its wet surface and impressions of raindrops over a dried and cracked body below, but this moment made me stop.

When I look at this picture, I can smell fall and damp earth and the last warmth of the day, feel the coolness of the shadows creeping over the trail, and in that narrow band of focus with the suggestion of more all around, I get lost in the cracks and the textures, reading the story in the mud.