Aaron Reichow, untitled

Last week’s steep drop in temperatures had me thinking, overeagerly, of Fall. It has always been my favorite season for its paradoxical combination of things reaching fruition, then brilliantly flaming out. With luck we’ll see a harvest, survive the Winter on what we’ve stowed, and celebrate another Spring. Without luck, well, we’ll have joined the grand circle.

Hattie Peterson, untitled

I would rather see a photograph of pencil shavings than a high resolution Hubble space telescope image of some distant star cluster. Maybe that’s because I am already profoundly aware of my own insignificance, and therefore hold the inconsequential beauty of ordinary things closely. Reality doesn’t require hypermediation, and I would dearly miss all that’s sensual in what is close at hand if I were somehow, someday deprived of it.

Aaron Reichow, untitled

My grandpa Mohrbacher moved to Duluth in 1928 and was a tenant at the Traphagen home, which was gutted by arson the week before I arrived here. I was lamenting this loss to a sauerkraut maker I’d met at a cider pressing who told me he’d lived there in the 70s when the home became the Redstone Apartments, and that he had some interior photos. They were beautiful. I could picture my grandpa in the same sun room, occupied by a new friend over 50 years later.

Kip Praslowicz, “Crowd. 4th of July Parade. Superior, WI”

This was a tough theme, and it’s gratifying to see how each of you broadened it: Richard’s 50th Anniversary of the Wright gas station in Cloquet and the 25th Beargrease, Kip’s shots from the 4th of July, or Kyle celebrating a month of Jane’s being cancer free. I went conventional, with my folks’ belated anniversary honeymoon. We mark time in many ways.

Brandon Wagner , “Hawaiian Punch”

Paul wins the horse race from the 30 or so photogs who snapped Kip’s birthday shots last week. And I’ve included a black and white photo, because as Van Gogh asserted, they’re colors too; though pedants would argue that in a subtractive color space, white is the absence of color. I bristle.

Bente Soderlind, untitled

As a Catholic in exile, I am grateful to have found  a far less-dogmatic refuge in Quaker meetings, where silence is a central tenet. These suited the syncretic nature of my beliefs, and afforded somewhere to weekly “center;” to hear that inner voice, or to just mutely chant the Meow Mix jingle (“I want tuna, I want chicken, Meow Mix flavors keep me lickin…”). But as is evident this week, there are many ways to calm the din, and places to find quiet.