Evening On The Porch With Talisker
Maybe it was the double scotch –
Talisker Storm 45.8 % Alc/vol – I’d poured myself while waiting for Carol to
arrive, giving me that little ‘float’ that I find gives my mind the relaxation
to see the things around me with a freshness usually lacking in my day-to-day. I hadn’t intended to do a double but there it
was in the little etched stemless goblet that I had found in the local antique
shop in what is now the Old Cramer’s
Store of my younger days, and I was not about to let it go to waste. And even though I still did the slow-sipping,
enjoy-the-taste as is my normal wont, I did do it a bit quicker as I inhaled
the aroma and the taste of the isles letting the flow of the Storm loft me
along. We live up a long unpaved road,
surrounded by the temperate forest of the peninsula jutting into the upper
Chesapeake Bay, far enough in that on a thick misted evening like tonight the
only sound as I walked out into the dark of the evening of our rugged porch was
the Brownian motion of air molecules in my ears occasionally over-ridden by
faint faint sounds of traffic on the distant corridor of transport miles to the
north. Immediately the soft focused view
of the large old oaks and the large old junipers ghosted above me with faint
misty halos of light from the living room windows vague and ethereal floating
like some old master deeply ochered painting against the deep black absence of light that was the forest behind them, that I knew were beyond my
amateurish photographic capabilities – but it was a scene impressive in its
potential, impressive enough to spur me to write these words, to once again try
to push photography – my photography at least – into the rendering of art that
the human eye, the human brain, can be aware of from the simplest of natural
scenes that rendered properly gives one pause and reflection and desire to
share this one sparse moment in time and place with others so that they too can
be momentarily above the mundane and into the rare. And I know that I do this from time to time –
some vista that my awareness groks is captured in my camera and when I upload
and see it in front of me I feel that oneness with the scene and some few
others too are evoked. So the Talisker,
did its duty for me and my brain truly freshened for a while – the scene though
still vivid in my mind remains uncaptured and if my skills improve, it may
repeat some misty evening in the fall.
