Found Objects 2: Tiny Miracles Of Nature

"Your transformation
will be the miracle."

-- Holly Lynn Payne, 

DAMASCENA: The Tale of Roses and Rumi

Praying Mantis ootheca (egg sack) 12-1-14

"Today for show and tell,

I've brought a tiny miracle of nature."

-- Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

"For a moment, our eyes see and our ears can hear

what is there around us always."

-- Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

My guys did a lot of hunting over the long Thanksgiving weekend. 

That means instead of sleeping late like most of his his classmates, Leo was up at the ass-crack of dawn, dressed in camo and face paint, hunkered down in a cold cornfield snuggled up to his 12-gauge shotgun hoping to shoot geese out of the sky.

In the afternoons, they went traipsing around the woods hunting rabbits and pheasants.

In all they bagged one goose, one pheasant and two doves (which produce the meat equivalent of a chicken nugget).

While hunting in the woods, they also found several Praying Mantis egg sacks, or ootheca.

It's a good thing they brought them home. I didn't know this, but it's a good idea to relocate Praying Mantis eggs into territory away from the cannibalistic carnivorous mother who laid them so that she doesn't eat her own hatchlings. 

My husband stashed the egg sacks in sheltered spots outside in the shrubbery. Come springtime, hopefully the ootheca will crack open and nymphs will hatch and we'll have baby Praying Mantises again.

Baby Praying Mantises are tiny miracles of nature -- perfect, exact, miniature, impossibly small replicas of the big guys. I love having them around the yard and garden, so I am happy to provide them room and board -- garden plants, flowers and all the associated pests they can eat -- as long as they want to stick around for the buffet.

I guess you could say we're preying for a miracle.

Heh. Heh. Good one.

Found Objects

"Did you find anything special," Blackie asked.

T. nodded. "Come over here," he said, "and look."

-- Graham Greene, Shock!

Found pink rubber bracelet 11-30-14

"And isn't the whole point of things -- beautiful things -- 

that they connect you to some larger beauty?"

-- Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

On the windowsill in my mudroom is a collection of random objects.

A purple plastic magnetic number "2." A small wiffle ball. A feather. The plastic trailer from either a toy train or a toy truck advertising Leikeim (a German brewery) "Limonaden" (lemon soda). A miniature bobble-headed toy cat.

I found each of these things on my walks. 

I often find interesting things on my walks, sometimes on bike rides. 

Lost things.

Discarded things.

Fallen objects.

Sometimes I pick these fallen objects up and put them in my pocket and bring them home. Yesterday was particularly bountiful. By the time I returned home, I had a pocketful, and a handful. It was like a treasure hunt.

In a four-mile trek around my town I'd found:

a deflated balloon bouquet
a rusty razor blade
a cheap silver bracelet
a broken rubber bracelet
a rock painted pink
a theater ticket
a pinwheel
a gold star
an Easter egg

Sometimes I photograph the objects. Some I photograph here at home. Others I leave where they are and return later to photograph them in situ.

Yesterday's collection got me thinking.

I've been on the fence about whether I want to do a 365 days project for 2015. Mostly because I've been waiting for an idea to strike, an idea compelling enough to get me excited about sustaining my streak for yet another year.

I think I found it.

I found it in the stuff I found. 

I was photographing this dirty, broken pink cancer awareness bracelet imprinted with the word "strength." It's just cheap rubber. A bit of trash. Found on a roadside. Nothing special. Broken. Useless. 

But the image of it struck me as somehow lovely. Beautifully tragic. Ironic and incongruous. Hopeful? Hopeless? All of the above. I look at it now and this simple, fallen object tells a story.

Artists make art from found objects all the time. (It's the best kind of recycling. It's also a helpful way to clean up the neighborhood.) So for next year, I think maybe that's what I'll do. 

Who knows? It might be a good idea.

Look out for fallen objects!