Hi friends!
Last week I was feeling a little creative burnout. Luckily, there is a fun cure for that: Get out your camera and take a blossom walk!
So I hit the streets with my weirdest lens, the one I reach for when the flowers pop in the spring and I need a boost of inspiration. I walked through my neighborhood, down the hill toward the river, and then west toward downtown Portland. The skies were steely, but it was a gentle day with occasional jags of light rain.
My only goal was to be overwhelmed by observation. To notice how the bubblegum pink camellias exploded alongside a brick red house. To see the pale pink buds flowering into snow white puffballs. To understand how the most extraordinary blooms emerge on even the gnarliest old trees. To seek out sidewalks littered with fallen tulip tree blossoms. To pause with delight when the breeze sifted pink petals into my hair.
This particular lens gives everything a velvety glow. The lens and its effects are unpredictable—sometimes it pairs with the internal light meter in my camera and sometimes it does not. Using the lens requires manual focus, both energetically and practically. The world takes on new proportions when seen with this lens. Photos don’t turn out how I think they will. Sometimes it’s for the better, often it’s for the worse. It doesn’t matter, not really. It’s all just for fun, to refresh my eye and spirits.
The blue house you see here? I liked how I caught a glimpse of it in my peripheral vision, down a side street to my left as I strode down the hill. It looked like a magical spring fairyland—a giant white tulip tree and its fallen petals decorating the sidewalk and the steps leading to the front porch. My eyes watered as I focused the lens. I wanted my picture to glow with the same scrim of pollen I felt on my face and in my hair.
I sneezed, then continued down the hill. I caught a bus over the bridge. As I walked toward the waterfront, I passed a sign outside Paddy’s, an Irish pub on Yamhill and First. It advertised itself as the home of “The World’s Largest Irish Coffee.” Huh, I thought. How big could it be? Turns out Paddy’s earned a Guinness World Record last year for brewing a 1,000-liter Irish Coffee. I entered the bar for the regular-sized version. Here’s how it looked with my weird lens.
Inside, the bar was quiet. As I drank my boozed-up coffee and ate a salad, I eavesdropped on a conversation between a man in his late 60s and the bartender. The man was talking about his youth working construction, how he got paid $22 an hour and drank a lot of it away. It was 12:15 p.m. on a Saturday and he was on his third drink. Every Irish pub in North America has one of these barflys. Perhaps they come attached to the deed; they’re definitely part of the charm, unless they corner you and start talking. Was I here last week? he asked the bartender.
I finished my coffee, and then walked along the riverfront toward the Japanese-American Historical Plaza. There, cherry trees serve as a monument to the people our government forced into internment camps during World War II.
The trees were beautiful, at peak bloom. The crowds didn’t bother me. Maybe some of the blossom chasers know the trees serve as a monument, maybe some don’t. I was surrounded by other people celebrating the annual blossoming of trees—what could be more joyful than our collective salute to spring? Everyone was taking photos. I could have taken so many photos of people taking photos. These were my people, the blossom walkers with their cameras, out for a good time on a Saturday afternoon in the flowering trees.
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
How car culture in the American West kills people and wrecks communities.
Tove Danovich, a Friend of The Windfall Dispatch, dug into the mystery of Portland’s crows. (Her first book, Under the Henfluence, just came out in paperback.)
Beverly Cleary character sculptures badly need maintenance, neighbors say.
Here’s what happened when a climate reporter tried to ditch natural gas.
Why we’re spending so much money. The ease of frictionless payment methods, among other factors.
Giant redwoods are thriving in the UK.
This American Life examines the too-long list of journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas war.
Gorgeous!