#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Star Shape in Fresh Ice, Charles River
There is snow, two or three inches underfoot, from a storm yesterday, and this morning it is exceptionally cold, even under the blazing sunshine of a cloudless sky. And the river, once again, like glass. A glowing shape catches my eye. Milky white on the surface of black ice, a cluster of dried weeds fast frozen into the shape of a star.
After I walk, I'm still wondering about why I took this picture – what it stirs in me. The word that springs to my consciousness is galaxy, so that's where I let it take me. And I look up galaxy and here is this NASA picture on Wikipedia which seems to mirror my ice sculpture.
“A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter...”
NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellationComa Berenices, is about 55,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 60 million light-years away from Earth
Maybe this connects to my pictures and writing from yesterday. I was so stirred by the picture post card of my very place on the river - taken over a century ago. I wonder who stood there in 1905 in the prickles and brambles I know so well? She or he must have cared in the way I care about this view, this view of the Charles that has changed so little in all these years. Seeing the post card picture next to my own fresh made picture made me feel, paradoxically, part of something infinitely larger and infinitesimally smaller all at the same time. Like the way Rebecca feels in Our Town, when she tells her brother about the letter Jane Crofut got from her minister:
“I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America…Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the mind of God – that’s what it said on the envelope. (I.441-3)”
All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar 2017 unless otherwise attributed