Common Nature

Taken on 17 April 2017 at 17:00 US Eastern Daylight Savings Time in Dayton, Ohio, US:





This is a snapshot, taken some years earlier, from the place I left in May of 2023. Cherry blossoms are relatively uncommon in Dayton, but flowering crabapples, in red, mauve, pink, and white, are a signature of spring—and this specimen, fallen face down onto the concrete sidewalk, is a perfectly serviceable representation of the sad beauty of transience. The flower is long since gone, of course; so is the tree that bore it, sawn down in the gentrification project when the property changed hands at just about the beginning of COVID quarantine; so is the irascible albino squirrel who claimed it as territory (you don’t seriously think that little expletive deleted deigned to hold still for a photo.) And now, in the Rust Belt desertion and inexorable southward demographic gravitational suck, I’m gone from the premises too.

(I never bothered to photograph much of the surroundings of my native and near-lifelong Dayton: first because I didn’t own a camera until 2010, and didn’t figure out how to host the images until the mid-to-late teens, and didn’t own a home computer of any sort until 2020, and above all because I never anticipated leaving until it was too late.)

Strelitzia reginae in bloom in a bedding of white seashells, with low-growing palms and (agave?) also visible in the flower bed, taken on 18 August 2023 at 15:43 US Eastern Daylight Savings Time:





The mature male specimen of Homo sapiens var. euroamericanus was a passerby and did not give his express consent, but the color of his T-shirt coincided so perfectly with the blue nectary petals of the flower that I decided to keep him; the measure I took to respect his privacy somehow completes the composition.)