As I said in my last post, I am starting to feel better--almost entirely well.
The period of concussion recovery was quiescent, necessarily. Now I'm feeling stirrings inside.
There's a feeling--an instinct, almost--beginning to well up in me, whispering that it's time to get moving again. I'm feeling restless and cabin-feverish, and oh, I am so ready for spring. I have cautiously begun to exercise again. Although I'm still careful enough to continue masking when I'm inside in public spaces, the pandemic is easing (for now, at least, until there's another widespread variant).
Winter weather is hanging on here in Minnesota (it was 0 degrees when I woke this morning) but the predictions are that a warming trend will make us see 50 degrees early next week.
That made me think about sugaring season. We have maple trees here in Minnesota, and the local parks and recreation centers schedule sugaring sessions starting about now, when people, especially children, can tour the park and see the process of collecting sap and boiling it down for maple syrup. I checked, and the parks are beginning to schedule these sessions starting this week. The Minnesota DNR website
says:
Maple sap runs best when daytime temperatures are in the high 30s to mid-40s and overnight temperatures are below freezing. This cycle of above-freezing days and below-freezing nights needs to continue for several days, although nature occasionally has been known to provide a good run under less perfect conditions.
Sometimes sap flows as early as January or as late as May, but in Minnesota, sap usually runs from about March 15 to April 20.
Thinking about that, I put together this card.
Now, sometimes my ideas for digital collages don't quite work, and I think this is one of them. I feel a little disappointed in the result. I still have the old problem of, 'how do I take pictures of myself when I live alone?' I now employ a delay timer app. But I don't have a tripod (or even a decent camera), and so I have to prop the iPod up on a bookcase (heaven knows I have plenty of those) yet step far enough away that I can pose against a bare wall with nothing in the frame that will prevent me from editing out the background. The end result is grainy because it is taken at a longer than necessary distance with less than ideal light. The background is a little blurry, too.
Plus...I dunno. I sort of wanted to look...archetypal? Primal? Mysterious? Instead, I look like a (regrettably) frumpy woman in her sixties with a digitally overlaid twig crown. The color balance isn't right between the picture of me and the background, and that's something I don't quite have the technical chops (yet) to solve.
Rather than the impression I was hoping for, something mystical, I fear that I look ludicrous. Ridiculous.
Was it too self indulgent to include myself in the picture? I could get the point across with just the background of tapped trees and the twig with the dangling drop of sap, couldn't I? But I'm trying to get across that feeling of something rising ... in myself.
*Sigh* I tried. Never let it be said that I hide my artistic failures!
I thought it was a good idea, anyway. What do you think?
I do like that my head is silhouetted against the drop of sap dangling from the broken twig. The general arc of the twig crown echoes the curve of the drop, and that's at least a little pleasing. And I like that although the background is wintry, the reflections inside the drop of sap behind my head (seen through the scrim of the bare twigs of crown) look spring-like.
Sap
Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.
Click here to see the 2021 gallery.
