happy memories

Many thanks to Muse Mosey for asking me to guest post today. The concept of repeating patterns is little out of my comfort zone, and I enjoyed the challenge.

Growing up in New York City, I lived against a background of repeating patterns. The city itself is built on a grid plan, and everywhere I looked I saw repeating patterns in rows of windows, murals, subway tiles, construction sites, bridges, advertisements, and storefronts, the patterns always interrupted by the never-ending stream of people walking by them.

I live in the country now, where the roads meander and the backdrop is wild. Our “grid plan” is the pattern of the year and the changing of the seasons. There are patterns in nature, too, but one has to look harder for them. And people are few – one's more likely to find one's pattern interrupted by a cow or an insect.

This week I did look for patterns in nature and found many, and I looked for patterns in farms and lumber yards, and I found them. However, it was while photographing layers of stacked boards and pipe in a lumber yard that I looked up and saw my daughter walking past the roofing tiles, and seeing her against the patterns behind her gave me a sense of deja vu of growing up amongst the patterns of the city. Yet, the red of barn and the dirt beneath her feet in my photo marks it very much as “country” to me.

This photo of t.morris's, also brings back to me those memories of a life set against repeating patterns and who could resist the happy message on the wall?

Deirdre of superdewa photography and superdewa on flickr

strolling past happiness by tmosnaps