pauses&clicks

When I traveled to Virginia last week to see my new grandson I was delighted to find this scene outside the window of my hotel room in Alexandria.

I’m pretty sure one of my first photo shoots back in 1976 when I was a freshman in college was in a cemetery.  I still hold a fascination for them….for the serenity I find there, for the untold stories of the people interred on the grounds, and visually, for the beauty that happens to stone and memorials when time has weathered them.

A bonus, on the first morning I was there, was the fog that shrouded this cemetery, adding yet another aspect of  “weathering” to my experience.

As I approach 60 I have to admit to feeling a bit of weathering going on.  I know, “you’re as young as you feel”…..”sixty is the new forty”……blah, blah, blah…..but there’s no denying the knees that creak and require me to walk instead of run or the (gasp!) crepey skin and gathering lines around my eyes.

The knees I might eventually do something about but those lines on my face?  Like this beautiful wall, also near my hotel in Old Town Alexandria, I think I’ll embrace those wrinkles and lines, owning up to the laughter and worry and passage of time that has brought them on.

And just for grins, and because she warned me not include her in my post about weathered subjects, I incorporated this picture of one of my favorite people in one of my favorite pieces of art at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.

And really, it’s the window frame that’s weathered……not my beautiful friend on the other side of it!