the extensive wood playground — strat’s place, built in the early 1990s and named for the deceased father of someone in the town — is surrounded by orange trees now, blanketed in leaves and populated only by a red bucket here, a blue plastic shovel there. school is out on sundays, of course; but the area was closed off by shiny tape holding the swinging gates shut.
as i walked around the primary school ‘pods,’ single-floor barracks of classrooms with darkened windows, one glass frame holding a box with “we love scholastic books” on the inside sill, the air was thick with a heavy scent — paint, maybe stain. indeed: the playground structures were dripping with what appeared to be a viscous wet, in some instances as minute drops hanging suspended like stalactites from the wood. also, the smell was delightful in a surrendering sort of way.
the photographs i’ve taken to fulfill the second assignment re: significant detail seek a wider dialogue on the nature of nuance and detail — that is, given the range of scale we encounter in our experiences and the (collective) sense we make of them, “details” can range from the very small (as parts of a system, or particular activity/place) to the mid-size, to the moderately large (as a specific building among a collection of buildings, or a homeowner’s outspoken expression within a larger place/town); etc.
i deliberately wanted to have more “fun” in these photographs. i realized over the past few weeks that going home again (and again, and again) needn’t be somber to be reflective. there is joy in returning to a once-familiar place to explore newness and overlooked places (as there is a certain joy contentment in melancholy, too). there’s more color in these places; and yet some familiar tropes, i think. questions for the near future: how do words and symbols add meaning to places? can the mere idea of a physical symbol/word resonate more strongly than what the symbol represents?
that is all for now. again, it is late.
