Shooting still life on the shore.

January 2021.

A year ago everything started off so normal - all that hope surrounding a new year - and then we changed normal. The world crashed - not in some market-readjustment-we’ll-be-fine-in-the-morning kind of crash.

A big crash.

A crash so big it outed the ineptitude of a leader who discovered most quickly that he couldn’t bully this virus away. Nor its injustice.

This was new territory for us all. Go home, close down, school your children, learn zoom, wear masks and search for items of necessity.

Find yourself excited when you find yourself some toilet paper.

A few months stretched to many, and now a year is coming and 300,000 of our own are no more (soon to be more than a million), and we are not done, though we’ve never felt so done.

I didn’t travel as much.

Went To Richmond to see the statues of Civil War leaders painted in protest. To Raleigh just to be in the same town with my mother who was in the hospital with covid. I drove back home the same day.

I was quite sure she was going to die, but I would not be allowed to see her. Three weeks later she was home, not ready to give up at 91.

I thought a lot. Spent time on the shore of course. Cycled, pruned stuff, shot pictures in my bedroom in the late afternoon. Since few were going forward, I looked back and pushed onward, trying to make random objects I’d collected interesting in the streaming window light. Dancing with it. Waiting. Watching it move, while reworking shadows. Learning to see. Second guessing and giving up.

Coming back the next day. Starting over. It is how artists live.

We start over.