Dusk

The new camera is giving us all sorts of excuses to go out and find things to take pictures of. This process has made us realize that if our lives aren't interesting enough to photograph, we have a good reason to make them that way. Or, at the very least, to get out of the house.

A couple nights ago, while driving home from my brother's house on the north side of town, we drove down an arterial I take to work every day. For months I've been noticing these little bits of clever - and sometimes haunting - graffiti everywhere. There was a mile or so near the university where someone had simply tagged the word "feel" on utility boxes and road signs. In other spots I've noticed stenciled art, like a pit bull on the side of an overpass. It's all easy to miss, but once you've seen it, you see it every time.

I noticed this one last fall. It has since faded after months of rain, but we stopped to take a picture of it before it disappeared completely. "Saw her beautiful eyes here." I love the different directions you can take in imagining the love at first sight, and where it went from here.

From there, we drove up above the city to the Five Mile Prairie neighborhood to escape the late evening shadows and find the last bit of sun.

It's a strange little universe up there - sleepy meadows, quiet streets, and of course, new developments popping up everywhere - but it's still, amazingly, in the middle of town. (A little-known fact: Spokane's oldest house can be found here.) 

Driving down these roads transported me back to the summer evening walks and bike rides I used to take through the neighborhood where I grew up. That was before the other neighborhood developments came in, when people kept horses and grew corn and mint and let wildflowers (and weeds) go wild. One of those streets was (and still is) called Goldenrod. It was just like the one we drove down that night, complete with the signs in the ground, foretelling the end of that piece of paradise.