Pumpkin Season

I’ve gotten fonder of the warm months in my old age, but nothing beats October. It’s got my birthday and that holiday with all the candy and real historical significance, outside and inside become the same temperature, and trees really get rolling on those striking fall colors, revealing the yellow and red pigments that were hidden under the green all along. Autumn technically begins in September, but nature’s switch seems to flip only in October.

It’s an invigorating and fun time of year, and after a stubborn summer, I’ll take it.

Not many photos this time around; over the weekend I drove down to West Fork’s Bullwick Farms to get some pumpkins and photos of pumpkins. If you live around here and are looking for some, you might try them out, because their specimens are pretty much perfect.

Thanks for looking! And happy fall.

Dan

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Early Sunsets

Suddenly it’s November and the nights get below freezing and sunset is at 5 p.m. The trees and shrubs retreat around us and we have holidays about death.

Sadly I missed most of those holidays, just catching the tail-end of a Halloween event in Fayetteville’s square, then wandering around Springdale for a few hours in an unsuccessful search for a little Day of the Dead action.

That’s OK, though. Springdale had other attractions: a man who had no concern with me taking his picture while his car was repaired, a high school choir concert and a series of strikingly geometric store fronts.

I always love taking pictures of groups of people right before their group portraits. Instead of a dozen of the same face, the mask is gone, and you can see a dozen different facial expressions, with their focus inward and outward and somewhere in the middle.

One last thing this weekend: shooting a few photos for a pair of acquaintances, Taylor and Jess, who are in a relationship together. It was sort of an impromptu favor to give them some photos for their families. That earlier sunset I mentioned gave us about an hour of gorgeous light, while Lake Fayetteville and these two provided the scenery and cheesy sweetness.

Thanks for looking,

Dan

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Memory

It’s been a weekend full of art.

I came across a bagpipes rehearsal near my office after the solar eclipse this week, maybe for someone’s homecoming parade. Some family visited this weekend and went with me to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art up in Bentonville yesterday. Today, we went to Eureka Springs, a small town to the northeast that’s home to hundreds of artists and shops.

And tonight, I went to see “The Book of Life,” a beautifully animated romance and adventure story based around the Mexican holiday called el Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The observance, which is coming up this weekend, is a celebration of loved ones who have died, a way to remember them while enjoying food and color and light and taking away the sting and dread of death.

In the movie, the dead inhabit two realms: Those who have living descendants to remember them dwell in the boisterously colorful and fun Land of the Remembered, while those who have no such legacy wither away in the cold, gray Land of the Forgotten.

It’s a family film, but like the holiday it celebrates, it dives into some of my deepest, most fearful questions: What happens when I die, and will I be remembered? I don’t think I’m alone with these thoughts.

Art, I think, is at least partly an attempt to answer those questions: to make something to remember, and to reach past the boundaries of a lifetime.

We have sculptures and buildings and paintings and books, but a lot of humanity’s art is temporary, like a group’s playing of the bagpipes for a crowd or an interaction on a sidewalk. Other art doesn’t come from us at all, like a sunset or solar eclipse. I like to think of photography as a way to record this art, to say, yes, you existed, and you did or made or were something worth seeing.

I hope my photography also qualifies as art, because I’m trying to make something to remember, too. We all want to keep the party going in the Land of the Remembered.

So when I say thanks for looking, I mean it. I hope you have a good week.

Dan

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The Stage

This sunset came Friday — a perfect birthday gift. It was a tough week here. On Thursday, a solitary locomotive a few miles south of Fayetteville collided with a small, stationary passenger train it had been sent to help. No one was killed, but most of the 50 or so people on the two trains were jostled around pretty well, and a few were seriously injured. The AP and the Wall Street Journal had picked up the news by the time I left work.

It was a lot for us at the newspaper to deal with, but obviously the ordeal was far more agonizing for many people on the trains, including the driver of the aiding locomotive, who officials said was among the most severely wounded. I hope everyone recovers as well as they can.

Within half an hour of the accident, several dozen emergency responders in ambulances, fire trucks and deputy cars swarmed Highway 71 near the tracks, including a lot of volunteer firefighters I recognized. At least half a dozen agencies were involved coordinated their efforts. Even Benton County to the north sent ambulances southward to make sure all of this county remained covered.

Whatever’s going on with us humans, the seasons keep moving on.

As the sun neared the horizon Saturday, giants made of papier-mache and cloth gathered in Fayetteville’s Wilson Park to put on a play: It was time for the eighth annual Puppets in the Park. At least a hundred people, mostly families, sat and stood in a semicircle to watch a story about good and evil told only with music, gestures and caricatured masks.

Here, the Coyote leads the small Mud People to a better home, watched over by gods of the Sun and water. The goats helped. It was a simple, archetypal story, and the crowd gamely supplied enthusiastic cheers for the Mud People and boos for the grotesque villains along the way.

I’d never seen anything like it in person, but I loved it. The play felt old somehow, as if it were the re-enactment of a religious tradition kept for hundreds of years somewhere else in the world. The Art Experience of Fayetteville, which organized the event, also gave the story a political edge, setting it in the context of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who came to the U.S.’s southern border earlier this year.