Waters And Smoke

Still playing and failing with pictures of movement.  The dogs are getting annoyed.  We've reached summer, and summer gardening in California consists of watering enough to keep the plants from dying.  That, and tomatoes. 

Looking like modernist art.

Recently, I read the speed at which copper develops a green patina is dependent upon the pH of the water or moisture in the air.  The lower the pH, the faster the patination.  Here we are alkaline, and patina has been achingly slow to develop.   Just a bit of green coaxed from the copper after eleven years of water.

Too much tumult, not enough patina:

I kept going back to the Carex solandrii.

I simplified until I got a single Crassula flower stalk and a few blades of Carex shivering in the afternoon breeze.

Nice shiver, overexposed Crassula:

The movement of the Carex reminds me of the way the smoke from my Dad's endless cigarettes would coil and twist like languid Cobras through our still living room air.   



Cigarette smoke is the ghostly gray of death.  The Carex blades, though, carry the hopeful green of life in them.  The green in the Carex comforts me.  The narrator of "A River Runs Through It" is haunted by waters.  I understand that.  For me, it is smoke.   

What haunts you?