I loved creating a story with this months title, “ Picnic, Lightning.” Given to me by actor and all round beautiful person, Christopher Lowell, it was a delight to get lost in. Written by Nabokov at the beginning of his book Lolita, it describes the moment the protagonists mother got struck by lightning and killed.

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three…”   Years later those two words inspired the poet laureate Billy Collins to write one of his most beautiful poems. Chris sent this along as well and it became the predominant source of inspiration for this photo story, guiding me to see the fragility of life, how death could happen to us at any freak or fleeting moment, insisting that we enjoy and cherish the ordinary, find the beauty in our everyday because it could be our last.

“….The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body's rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore……Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.”

Thanks Chris this one felt like home.