Life of Wry

Even though I make this Northern –> Southern California trip a lot to spend a few days with my mom, I’m still moved to photograph stuff along the way….

1) The candy colored, geometricized farmscape of the central valley…

Okay…. maybe that was a little over the top.  How about this one, not so color enhanced:

2) The insanely beautiful and oh so familiar view from the Esplanade on our walk from Avenue I to Burnout. What you don’t feel in this picture is the light, warm breeze. I say with genuine passion and reverence… this just never gets old..

3) Mom sitting on a bench taking it all in. This also moves me. This is the one and only reason she flatly rejected the idea of moving to an assisted living community in Davis, wanted to remain in her house in Palos Verdes. She could not bring herself to leave the beach, in particular this stretch of beach, in particular doing exactly this on this stretch of beach.

4) Rows and rows of palms against the blue, ocean-cooled sky. I just love this, deep down to my spleen, wherever that is. Deep.

5) Seagulls flying overhead… which, seagulls are hard to track on a bright summer day at the beach with one’s smart phone camera.. really hard… but here he is anyway…

6) And of course some food we ate. For dinner tonight, we had the usual–my mom’s signature–chicken thighs in butter, wine, lemon, broth, lemon pepper.. and did I say butter? (lots of it), baked this time with zucchini, butternut squash, onions… which I did not bother getting another picture of. But I did take a picture of some sauteed butter…with mushrooms added for texture and flavor…

No pictures of gin rummy… but there was also plenty of that.

Day one in the bag.