Late last week I checked myself out for a couple of days, made my way to a little piece of river that I know in the nearby mountains and went fishing.  It was a much needed break after the last few weeks of back-to-back shoots.  Not that I wanted to stop shooting, rather that part of the method of making pictures is giving yourself time to let your brain settle down so that you can return to the camera with fresh eyes.  In the heat of the day –the time when the trout are flipping you the finger and would sooner eat a shoe than whatever fly you’ve laid down on the river –I took my pickup on a little trip down the banks to a place where the chokecherries put roots right into the water.  About the healthiest trees you’ll find and, after a few hours of wrangling the bitter berries from their stems and a slip-and-fall that put a tear in the ass-end of my new pants (why I wear new clothing to do this stuff is something that puzzles me, too), I found myself with 50 pounds of fruit and a truck-bed full of wild hops.  The hops are always a bonus, something that I never use for anything other than for the experience of driving home in the twilight, sliding the rear window of the truck open so that the crisp smell of the warmed flowers carry through the cab as I turn down the empty two lane road that spills back into the flatland that I call home.  It is the smell of dusk, of the changing of seasons, and each year I hang bunches of the flowers under my eves until the fall wind blows the dried seeds into my yard where they sprout new in the spring.

It was a good wind-down for the weekend, most of which I spent bouncing between cleaning and stemming chokecherries and a couple other events that friends around town put on.  Denver-based Slight Harp played a going-away show for two of their members (Alejandro, pictured above).  My friend Lynne, Ms. Mortuary Science herself, put on a little tennis match which proved to be the only place in town where you could find cigarettes, beer, and tennis rackets simultaneously clutched in the same set of hands.

Tomorrow starts the grind again, two pitches that have to be out the door by wednesday and prepping for another trip back to Wyoming in mid September.  And I’ve gotta find a wholesaler who will sell me 50 pounds of honey for the chokecherry bonanza.  Those bitter little fruits are like the rhubarb of the berry world.  Once they’ve found sugar, the effort is worth it.

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