Shooting in the Covid Part XIII: End of Fall

The Ohio State University

I was a student at The Ohio State University for ten years. I received my master’s in 1974 and my doctorate in 1983, in cultural anthropology. I always appreciated our beautiful campus, even though it is a perpetual construction zone. The campus is spread out over a good part of the city of Columbus. Nancy walks her dog, Pepper, in a park on the west campus. These photographs were taken on one of those walks at sunset.

When reviewing the photographs in my blogs, please look for the arrows on the right sides of the images. These arrows represent that the photographs are presented as a slide show. Nancy was concerned that my blog readers might be missing some of my photographs. Nancy is also concerned that my blogs have too many words.

Garden

My garden is inspired by not wanting to cut my lawn. I didn’t used to mind it, but it feels more and more like a waste of time. If I want to walk back and forth in symmetrical patterns, I’ll learn to play an instrument and join a marching band. I’ve been on a mission to expand beds around my house to shrink lawn. I also hate weeding. That activity might force me into a condo.

I used to have a large vegetable garden that spanned across my entire backyard. When my children moved out of the house, I lost interest in doing all the work involved in canning and freezing vegetables. Thus, the beds were transformed into perennials and grasses. Over the years, I’ve planted seeds (via helter skelter broadcasting) of annual flowers and I do put in about ten tomato plants of different varieties. We have a great climate for tomatoes in Ohio. As Pauline loved purple, many of our flowering perennials are purple. She loved the irises. I also have a large raspberry bed that is more than 30 years old. Leo and Stella love the raspberries.

These are the cosmos flowers I planted this spring. Even though they are annuals, I’ll be interested in seeing if there were enough of them to seed my garden next spring and summer.

The grasses give me the opportunity to shoot my abstracts. As the grasses go to seed and change color with the fall, the textures, patterns and colors are wonderful.

As the temperatures cool in the fall, the early mornings create more dew which reveal spider webs covering almost every living thing in my yard. More great colors, patterns, and textures. And I love that I don’t have to risk my life around people who carry germs to capture these photographs.

Nancy and I have significantly limited contact with anyone outside of our bubble. When she goes into work, she is incredibly diligent about staying safe. She follows the health guidance. We both do the same when we have to go into a store. There have been very limited numbers of adventures. The ones we’ve had mostly involve our family. On a cloudy Sunday morning, we met our children and grandchildren at a farm just outside of the city to do some apple picking. The kids also went out into a large field to pick pumpkins for Halloween. It is a beautiful farm and it was wonderful to be with our family.

Apple and Pumpkin Picking on the Farm

Farms have felt much safer than city parks. Nancy and I made a trip to a family farm about an hour outside of Columbus. The farm belongs to Nancy’s relative. It was a spectacularly beautiful fall day, and we enjoyed our socially distanced, masked time with family.

The Family Farm

My son and his family live in Cleveland. The only time I’ve seen Aaron, Hanni and their four sons since last March was during a short visit at the end of this past fall. We met on a playground near the dam at Alum Creek. I loved seeing them and have really missed them. This covid thing really sucks on so many different levels. As I was waiting for the kids to arrive, I walked down to the water and was hit over the head with the following abstracts. Are other photographers hit over the head with abstracts?

Alum Creek

And as I was sadly leaving my family, I was hit over the head with this tree.

And that was the end of fall.

I watched the inauguration and spent a large part of it crying. To be clear, I cry at the drop of a hat, and I’ve been known to cry during beer commercials. I felt an enormous relief and gratefulness for our country and for our democracy. While I am managing my life by being in denial about so much, this is not at all the case with my thoughts and feelings about our politics, our government, and our economy. It stares me in the face every day and I have so much concern about our future. These are challenging times, and it will take strong, insightful, smart, committed women and men to help us to a better place.

It all starts here.

Please read this bill: H.R. 1 For the People Act of 2021 of the 117th Congress. This bill was introduced on January 4th and focuses on major needed reforms to our election process. So many of my concerns expressed in my blogs are addressed in this bill, from gerrymandering to dark money that corrupt our elections. There is a read speaker application on the web site, so you can have it read to you while you’re going to sleep at night.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1/text

If you love democracy and if you love our country, there’s really no other place to go with our elections. Here is the sad reality. Republicans will never win a national election with their current ideas and policies. First, they had no platform in the last presidential election. The platform was, we’re going to do whatever the mentally ill, racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, carnival barker, dictator wants to do. They don’t have policies or ideas that help the average, working American. I could offer lots of examples, but I’ll give you one to make my case. During the Obama administration, they fought tooth and nail to kill the Affordable Care Act. They voted against it many times and couldn’t get rid of it. The Supreme Court also decided not to destroy it. The Orange Emperor also said he hated it and would replace it as soon as he took office. He said that his plan would be cheaper and better. During the first two years of his presidency, he had a Republican House and a Republican Senate. Nothing. They did nothing on health care. They don’t care if you have health care or how much it costs you, or whether it becomes entirely unaffordable for you if you are one of the millions and millions of people who have a preexisting condition.

Okay, here’s another example, just because I have no control over myself. There are millions of people who have lost their jobs during the pandemic. There is so much suffering going on in our country. The democrats are asking that money be sent to families so that they can pay their rent, utility bills and can feed their families. The republicans who had no problem giving the wealthy and corporations billions of dollars of tax breaks, suddenly were stricken with the fear of debts and deficits. Never mind that they racked up trillions of dollars of debt and deficits during the clown’s term in office. You didn’t hear a peep about it from any of them. None of them mention reforming their tax giveaway to the rich to shrink the debt and deficit. They have not one shred of credibility. If working people who are only suffering a little got checks from the government because the legislation broadly targets households making less than $75,000, that doesn’t cause me heartburn. What causes me heartburn is the billionaires who they gave billions more dollars to in their tax ‘reform’ that I’m helping to subsidize. It is immoral. And if you make $75,000 and you get a $2,000 check from the government, you are going to spend it which is good for our struggling economy. I understand why millionaires and billionaires vote for these people. The rest of us really need to be voting our economic interests.

The Republicans are pretty much on the wrong side of everything that concerns the average American. And with the era of the Orange Emperor, the party has taken a sharper and more dangerous turn to the far right. They’ve let in the crazies. When they start making excuses for hundreds of whack jobs storming the bastille to hang the vice president and do lord knows what to the speaker, they’ve decided to lay claim to the netherworld of our society. They’re going to look like saviors to the hermits living with lifetime supplies of raisins and bottle water on the outskirts of Zortman. The rest of us need to be seriously frightened. Their cause has nothing to do with the average American’s aspirations. Their cause is their personal power. Power, wealth, prestige. Please read my previous blogs.

The only way the party of crazy people can win a national election is to cheat. And that is precisely what they are setting out to accomplish. From voter suppression to voter registration gymnastics to claims of fraud in every direction, republican state legislators and secretaries of state will do everything imaginable to make it more difficult for people of color to vote.

Please read the legislation and while you are doing so, please think about how precious our democracy is and what would happen to our country if it were to be eroded any further or destroyed. And please wear a mask, wash your hands often, keep social distancing and get the vaccine when you are eligible. I’d love to go somewhere beyond my backyard to take pretty pictures. Thank you.