Twenty years

And so it goes.

Twenty years ago, I had just moved from South Carolina to Virginia and begun my career at James Madison University. Although it happened later for Elizabeth since she was staying behind to sell our house, my move north fell between a month long trip to South Africa and 9/11. A time of extremes...just like now.

One of my early memories of JMU was talking with a crying student in my office about the fear and sorrow generated by the collapse of the World Trade Center.

On September 12, 2001, I rented a cargo truck and drove to South Carolina to load up my lab and transport it to its new location. It was a strange experience on the mostly empty roads listening to all the radio stations cover one story. I worried a lot about what people might think of me in a box truck on the road. Especially if they could have known I was hauling lab equipment. After an hour on the road listening to the one topic on the radio no matter the station, I was amazed that I was even allowed to pick up the rental truck without FBI certification.

In the intervening two decades, not all has been bleak or scary. In fact, most of the time life has been amazing. This is what keeps us all going. the success of humankind must be largely due to our ability to scared out of minds and then laugh with family and friends the next day.

The world is a messy place and our parts in the drama are often uncertain. We experience beauty and horror almost never in equal parts. Much of the clockwork of the world seems to tick along whether we do anything or not. And if we do something, it seems not to matter what we do. Shit just happens regardless.

And so, here we are twenty years later. We still laugh and smile but there is a hesitation in our responses. The growing tribalism creates suspicion in new places, filling the spaces we used to be content to leave empty. The world abhors a vacuum and instantly fills these spaces with fiction when fact is absent or contrary to opinion. 

Fortunately, this blog is a place where objective reality is what I photograph. I'm not clever enough or patient enough to alter the reality that comes in the front of my camera by more than a few fence posts or a telephone wire or two. Regardless of the modern tribe to which you subscribe, there is only one reality and I'm doing my darndest to bring it to you. Perhaps this is, in its small way, helpful on those occasions when the center seems not to be holding.

Poo-tee-weet.