parkdale

I have gotten so bad at blogging personal photos!  Portrait sessions obviously take priority in editing and posting, and photographs taken for my own enjoyment and memory tend, recently, to sit in my Lightroom library, largely ignored.  It's a bit of a slow season so I'm making it a priority to revisit these photos and post here.  After all, this blog was first and foremost created to document my own experiences and give me a nice platform on which to revisit them down the road.
This particular (large) batch of photos comes from November 2014, when my family and I (sadly Evin could not get away from work) visited my grandparents at their home in Arkansas.  While the area is sparsely populated, we found ways to entertain ourselves for the week.  I made a basket from honeysuckle vines and used it all week in our pecan-picking efforts.  We drove to cypress-filled lakes and I photographed the heck out of them (more on that in a bit).  We shot guns at cans down by the bayou and we drove around for hours searching for a place to buy a bushel of sweet potatoes, only to find them for 10 cents at pound at Wal Mart.  We baked pies and prepared a Thanksgiving feast, our last to be enjoyed in that house in that part of the country (my grandparents recently moved away from Arkansas).  It was great to be able to spend time with my grandmother and grandfather there one last time before they left.
So…back to the cypress trees.  As long as I can remember, I was intrigued and fascinated by them.  When we were kids, my dad and grandpa used to take us fishing in my grandpa's boat (at least one of my fishing poles resides in the bottom of an Arkansas lake, as I was known to cast over-enthusiastically and throw the entire thing into the water) and we would get close to the big trees, their bases wide where they grew out of the water, the grey spanish moss hanging everywhere. The past two visits we've made to Parkdale, I have been extra interested in these trees.  In researching them online, I discovered they are in the same family (Cupressaceae) as the redwoods.  The redwoods!  The trees I have been dreaming about for several years now (maybe longer).  As a matter of fact, Evin and I are in the process of planning our trip to California to visit the redwoods in March.  I can't WAIT.

Anyway, farewell Arkansas.  It's time to explore other parts of this country!