Photo-A-Day: June

"The principles of true art are not to portray, but to evoke." --Jerzy Kosinski

I don't know about you but June came and went so fast, I'm still trying to process it all. Faces and places and  time all whizzed by. Thankfully another month of a photo each day helped record some of the highlights.

There were the special family visits and gatherings of course. And then, toward the end of the month came a different kind of highlight.You see, hubby and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary June 24. To mark the milestone, we retraced our steps to where we first met--and took a trip to Chicago.

Back all those many years ago we were college students and, coming separately from our respective schools, we had headed to Chicago for an education convention. Hubby traveled by bus, I arrived in a carpool of other students. We "bumped" into each other that first night and the rest, as they say is history. Some of the highlights of those days included walks in Grant Park, a play at the Blackstone Theater, and a subway ride to Wrigley Field for a Cubs game.

Well, we thought, what better way to celebrate our 40th than to re-enact some of those things? That's how we found ourselves on a bus (we're such sentimentalists) one day last week. Once in Chicago, we stayed in a hotel next to the old Blackstone Theater (now the site of a college), walked through the lobby of the hotel where we met, meandered through Grant Park, and once more rode the subway to Wrigley Field and took in a Cubs game, sitting in the same section and eating Cracker Jacks just like we did all those years ago. Which, looking back, doesn't seem so long ago after all. Those just starting out cannot comprehend just how fast those years do go by. Believe me.

We also went to Chicago's Institute of Art and to Millennium Park. We marveled at what we remembered and laughed at our confusion over how things had changed. It was a memorable trip--short but packed full of experiences and maybe just a couple of blisters (we did a monumental amount of walking). And that's another thing, the way architecture, patterns, colors and designs caught my eye. I credit that to the practice of taking a photo-a-day all these months.


Emotions worked their way into the experience, too--often swinging up and down in joyful, nostalgic, surprised, anticipatory, anxious, appreciative, reflective moods. Made me, as a writer, want to capture it all. Yep, I filled my writer's bag (or journal as the case may be) with images and ideas, characters and settings, sensory and structural details. Faces emoting, places evoking. The month of June gave me lots of material. Have a peek...

___________________________________