Truth.
I’ve been a very bad blogger! But I’m back in the game, and starting off this week with my delayed week 5 from the 52 week project I’ve been doing. The topic for week 5 was “small town”.
I’ve lived in a small town almost my entire life. The earliest place I can remember is Krum, Texas, population under 1000. Hot stepping it across the sizzling pavement barefoot, sloshing through the gutters on rainy summer afternoons looking for crawfish, and eating popsicles in the steamy afternoon sun were common occurrences. I finished kindergarten in Mrs. Belkins afternoon class, 1st grade in Mrs. McCaughns class and 2nd grade in Ms. Peppers class. I went to my very first pee wee cheerleading camp put on by the high school cheerleaders who I thought were untouchable, got my first pair of glasses and was amazed that the leaves on trees weren’t blobs of green, and went weekly to the Saturday matinee with friends followed by the cool, refreshing water of their pool.
My grandparents lived on their ranch about 5 miles away in Sanger, Texas and my grandpa would come and pick all of us kids up each Saturday morning to go to “DQ” as he called it (Dairy Queen). We were allowed to get 1 small vanilla ice cream cone and then he’d either take us driving on the dusty, back dirt roads or to sit and “think” at the thinking spot by his barn. I distinctly remember him getting out of his old Ford pick up truck and telling me to parallel park between the fence posts. I was 7 years old. Somehow everything seemed ultra magical when I was little.
Nathan and I tried living back in Texas for a while after we were first married and all I can remember about those awful 6 months, was how unbearably hot it was, how much traffic was in the city, and all the cicada’s that were so loud at night. OH! and all the coyote’s howling in the woods. But still…..those childhood memories are wonderful. Some other small towns I’ve lived in over the years? Sanger, Texas; Forney, Texas; Dillon, Montana; Nephi, Utah, and finally, before I got married, Emmett, Idaho.
You see my dad loved the small town atmosphere. Maybe it was because he spent all day long in tall high rise buildings working in the computer industry and traveling the world to huge cities. Maybe it’s just because he wanted his kids to be able to grow up in a place where things were just a little bit slower than most. Who knows? All I know is that as I’ve had my own children, I long sometimes for those experiences that you can get growing up in a small town. Even though I thought I hated it when I was young and vowed that I would always live in the city, somehow my views have changed over the years and I’m thankful that my parents kept us in the “small towns”.
My images this week are some of the very first images that I took after getting my first DSLR, the Canon 40D in 2008. I was staying at my parents home in Idaho for an extended period of time while Nathan was out to sea and I was learning the in’s and out’s of photography. I still love these images even though many of them aren’t “technically” perfect. It reminds of the interesting places in small towns and it also reminds me of those first few months in photography and the excitement I had about everything. I decided to go back to the RAW files for the topic this week, and reprocess some, now that I know a little more than I did back then. Enjoy! and this weeks topic will be TOYS……
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