The temperatures are higher now and the flowers are popping, at least here in Central California. It feels warm, hopeful, and refreshing after a long, cold, damp winter – a winter unlike any other in the past fifteen years I’ve lived in the Sacramento area.
During the past four months, power outages were frequent, electricity bills were high, and the house was cold and dark. I sat here at night listening to the fearless winds’ whispers, and in the morning, when I saw my neighbors’ frozen rooftops, I did not want to get out of bed. But I knew that eventually, the bleakness of the season would give way to the color, warmth, and vibrancy of spring, because seasons do not last forever.
Contrasting with the earths’ seasons, the seasons of our lives do not come back. Leaving our parents’ house, graduate school, a job, a city, and finally, life, are more definitive. Even when a “coming back” is possible, it may feel more like a new discovery, because when we leave a place for a long time, we change, and the place we leave behind also changes. Close friends become strangers, family members age, move away, die.
Walking in the fields of Fairfield, CA, after a heavy rain, I saw a closed gate to a “private property.” Sometimes a photo is just an observation. “Gee, I’m glad they locked the gate,” I said to myself. I wonder where they went, if anyone will ever return, and what’s there to return to, beyond a flooded entrance to a locked gate without a fence, a sign that reads that the property is private, and the bleakness and beauty of California’s Central Valley beyond it.
I took the FEATURED IMAGE above on April 5, 2023 in the Rush Ranch Open Space, at 56mm, f/18, 1/100s, ISO 400. I passed around the gate and in the partly flooded fields I found the first bloom of a mustard plant.
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It is all about the light 
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