mown hay should really be a perfume.

It really should. 

I would bottle that scent up and put it away for a December day, when I would take it out and smell golden fields while I sighed and watched the bleak grey landscape of winter out my window. 

It's summer. The golden time; the hay bale time; the season of blushing roses, straw hats, raspberry bushes plump with their harvest, and barefoot walks through waist-high wheat. There are flower seeds in our window sill, freckles on my nose, and sundresses dangling in the breeze on the cloths line. 

Meanwhile, thank-you notes are piled in the mailbox, and my graduation cap hangs in the closet to collect dust until I pull it out in the eve of life and remember that dream called youth. For yes, I am at long last graduated--and the days stretch before me like an entrance. Summer opens her arms, and I feel like jumping into them with "wild abandon."

But that sounds too poetic. I think my summer will be just as oxymoron-ic it always is: crazily quiet and hectically slow, tinted with the scent of freshly mown hay. 

daisy ventures.

I sling my bag onto my bike and swing onto the seat. My feet pump the pedals and I rattle down the fielded hill, feeling every pothole. I reach the quiet road and skim down the pavement, feeling the cool spring wind blowing my face. I pass daisies bobbing their heads to the beat of the breeze, their faces almost golden in the setting sun. I stop and grab my camera from its bag. 

A woman strolling by stops to ask me what I'm doing. 

"Taking pictures of daisies," I say. It sounds simple, and silly. But she smiles and gazes at the flowers before us in a rather wistful way.

"I used to make daisy chains with my sisters," she says. And I smile, too. 

I pedal down the road with a chain in my hair and petals on my wheels. I pass an old house with an old bike and an old cat in its front yard. The mailbox is surrounded by a tangle of greens, and I wonder what sort of letters it has held in the years gone by. 

I glimpse a man in the window, and I hurry by, embarrassed for stopping to stare. But I like to admire, and old houses are more beautiful than new ones. Their windows have souls. 

marie | portland, oregon senior photography

"Sometimes, people are beautiful.

Not just in looks,

Not just in what they say,

Just in what they are."  -Markus Zusak

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I met Marie this past Fall when I joined my local swim team (and dang, is she crazy talented in that venue!). She is such a sweetheart, and has some of the prettiest blue eyes I have ever seen. We had so much fun traversing through the fields (even though she is allergic) and the Scotchbroom, even trespassing once (shh!) in someone's backyard to get some shots with the lilac bushes. 

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