Honolulu – Change is in the Air

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Sailboats and Surfers on Golden Seas

Mark Twain is famously quoted as saying “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait five minutes.” I imagine this would be true in most of the United States, but I didn’t expect it to be quite so true in Hawaii. Hawaii, to this Midwestern born and raised woman’s way of thinking, meant sunshine. And true, I was blessed with sunny skies much of the time I was traveling the islands.

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Setting Sun

Bright skies, glowing sunsets sliding below glowing horizons.

 

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After the Sunset

And circus colored remnants once the sun had set.

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Honolulu Gray Skies

But just as often I could turn around and see the nearby mountains cloaked in gray. I’d be walking along the streets under sunny skies, wondering where I’d misplaced my sunglasses, and then the sun would disappear above the clouds. I no longer needed sunglasses. Instead I needed an umbrella.

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Catch a Rainbow

And I really didn’t need an umbrella for long, only an awning to shelter from the rain. Within minutes, the skies lightened and the famous Hawaii rainbow appeared.

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Rainbow Reward

Five minutes was plenty of time for a change. Rain. Sun. Windy. Calm. Or a rainbow as reward.

Flaming Torch Flower

Flaming Torch

Flaming Torch © 2012 Bo Mackison

“A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul.” ~ Sadi

Yes, it is another view of the famed Torch Cactus, the desert flower I fell in love with a few weeks ago, just days before I traveled from the arid, hot deserts of Arizona to the moist, cool Midwest. It is a good thing (for me, at least) that I was quite infatuated with these particular flowers and so took hundreds of photographs of them in different poses, colors, etc.

In fact, these flowers will be, though unintentional when photographed, one of my themes for a week or so.

Since returning to Wisconsin, I’ve managed to mess up my photo catalogs and so my many thousands of photos (including photos of subjects other than the Torch Cactus flowers) are hiding somewhere in my computer or on one of my external hard drives, but I’ll be darned if I can figure what the magic words are to make them appear again. (Sigh. Big sigh. Oh heck, a really, really big sigh!!)

And yes, I could take some new photographs and re-install all my software and reboot my computer a dozen time with the  hope that I would then have some new photographs to work with.

But . . .  since I’ve been back in Wisconsin (one week today) I have seen a great deal of rain clouds and rain, two things I work hard to be grateful for, because they are greatly responsible for all these glorious greens in the trees and the grasses and the gardens. But wet conditions have caused delays in my outdoor photography plans. So I am posting a new view of the Torch Cactus flower.

Patience. Soon, very soon, the sun will shine. I’m sure of it.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is cleaning her house, and occasionally checking the weather channel. Just in case . . .

Traveling East, A Spring Greening

The greening of the trees in spring rain,
see-through trees like a lacy negligee, the nesting bird
watches from the half-leafed trees.

Traveling in the Rain

Rain Travel © 2012 Bo Mackison

Calves balancing on gentle hills rub their noses in the wet grasses.
One stands wobbly, leans against its mother.
Others watch their mothers watching them, nibble a bit, suckle,
wander about the remains of last fall’s tattered harvest.

Darkest brown, Iowa’s earth, earth that dips
and dances. We’ve driven past the Kansas grasslands,
and not yet reached the prairie flat of Illinois.

See the family plot tucked tightly between
the edge of the woods and the tilled field;
Splintered posts and strands of wire mark its boundary.
Roughly hewed stones, two rows of three, the mossy inscriptions illegible.
Though one, a mother’s marker, is split in half – part upright,
part broken off and tipped into the rain-soaked grass.
The roughened quarry block, now a rest stop for crows,
splats of white the only sign of life.

Clouds hang gray, so low I yearn to stand
and push them high into the skies, high enough to punch an opening into the dim blueness
that is Midwestern sky, give sunlight to the earth.
Yet fog lingers, sky primed in deep grays.

We pass a highway sign, What Cheer, population 142. Twenty miles south.
I wish to see a town worthy of this name, but we’re on the fourth morning of steady travel.
There is no will to detour.
Tonight we sleep in the familiar ridges and valleys of our familiar bed.

First I will say hello to the house I left a hundred days ago,
walk through the rooms I know by memory, peer out the back window at the apple tree.
I’m told no blossoms remain.

Oklahoma, Gray Skies, and a White Truck

White Truck © 2012 Bo Mackison

I bought a primitive statue of a woman last summer from a stone sculptor the next booth over.
She toppled in a winter storm. My husband mentions this
as he pulls into the Save-n-Go in Dubuque for gas and coffee.

Tomorrow morning I’ll push her upright so we can watch the garden together.
We will meet, eye to eye, and reflect on the greenness of Midwest spring.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. After four days of cross-country travel, Bo is back home in the Midwest.