In response to today’s Daily Prompt: Do Not Disturb.
Over the weekend, WordPress offers up a Daily Prompt urging photographers to post pictures of hands. I remember one I took a few years ago of my father’s hands wrapping wire near the tailgate of his work truck.
It’s the weekend and I’m lazy, so I only imagine posting the photo, never actually doing it. In the meantime, we visit Mary’s garden and she gifts me three big dahlia’s, wet with May rain.
This morning, I’m still thinking about my dad’s hands. The ones that are weathered from the sun, and always bearing some nick or scratch. They look tough but their skin is thin.
There’s something about the juxtaposition of hearty hands wrapping sharp wire and delicate blooms dripping with rain water. I want to put these images together. So different, yet, somehow connected.
I know Mary’s got working hands, callouses and dirt under the nails. But those hands cultivated these bursts of color blooming with petals, silky soft.
My father’s hands tighten barbed wire on splintered fence posts in 105 degree sun. But they also hold pen to paper, scrawling poetry of snow melt over granite and lush green pastures.
Here’s to what we have a hand in.
Sometimes change is not a pretty picture.
Take Bent Tail, for example. This is one of the handful of geckos that live in our tropical abode. He’s the only one we’ve named, as he’s distinguished by that bent tail. It’s got a story of its own, one we’ll never know.
Geckos can lose a tail and grow back another. Bent Tail seems to have damaged his, but never lost it, still holding his historic reminder.
On this day, he comes close to the kitchen sink. His little gecko toes vertically gripping our window frame. At this proximity, I see that Bent Tail seems to be letting go of something.
Shedding his skin, he looks a mess. Even a little thin and frail, if you ask me. I know little about geckos, but I do know that transformation can be just plain ugly sometimes.
This photo is nothing fetching, either. My hand was poised around drying dinner plates, trying to steady my wrist in a macro shot, close enough to capture, but not so zoomed that I scared him. He was a patient and generous subject in all of his awkward Shift.
We’ve been observing Bent Tail in the rafters for years. He is a strong survivor. Here’s to his Spring breakthrough. An outgrowing of the old.
To all things not so beautiful. The story of the butterfly, the swan.
And with that, Bent Tail and I offer up our submission to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Change.
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