This image was created from a photograph I took of the base of the mailbox in front of my house on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. I noticed it this morning while taking Bevo out for his walk. I used a Photoshop plugin from Topaz Labs to give it the appearance of a colored pencil drawing.
Most people would not consider this a very interesting picture. If they paid attention to it at all they would probably ask - why?
This morning was a quiet, sunny morning and when I saw the uncut grass framing the base of the post holding up my mailbox I remembered sunny mornings on my grandfather's farm in a rural part of South Texas. I loved the scenes on his farm, including fences with grass growing around the posts, and fields with cows and scattered wildflowers in the spring. I was standing in the street in front of my house while Bevo sniffed a pile of crinkled dead leaves; and I was staring at this beat-up post with its unruly grass garnish and remembering how I used to feel safe and happy walking around the farm feeling the sun warming my body and listening to the soft staccato melodies of chirping birds accompanied by distant rumblings of a tractor on another farm somewhere out-of-sight. Time drifted slowly for me then. I never imagined anything would change, and I didn't want anything to change.
Those days are decades in the past and more than a thousand miles away. My grandfather died when I was sixteen and the small farm where he lived was sold. I never saw it again. This simple image took me back across time and distance and made me feel happy, so I took a photograph of it. Isn't it so interesting how our brain can make so much out of something so apparently meaningless?
Monte