I’ve been very busy in the studio these days – working on several client projects that I will share at some point – but today, my mind is on my oldest grandson Damien, and my mom. Sometime during my childhood, mom wrote music to a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson:

The Swing
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside -

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown -
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

She would sing as she pushed her children higher and higher. I still hear her voice. And my heart becomes so full when I see my boy flying just as high.

To get to our house, from the main road off the interstate, you make a turn onto Pleasant Grove Rd., then another turn onto Pinson, and another one onto Owens Lane. My favorite turn is the first one. There are two farms with pasture lands on either side of the road and we have come to recognize and look for the cows (and one donkey) who graze there every day. Four-year-old Keanu exclaimed one day – “Look, it’s Donkey Hodie!” (check out PBS Kids for the talking donkey…) Well, the name stuck – although in my mind, I see it as Don Quixote and somehow it is very fitting.

So no surprise then, to find myself standing in the roadside ditches to stay out of the way of traffic, with camera in hand, trying to capture the essence of this new place we call home. These two photographs now grace our hallway.