Wearing Red on Valentine's Day

On Valentine's Day I awoke at seven, put on my red Eddie Bauer vintage down, my Danners with the red laces and had breakfast with my roommates at a local diner. After mowing down a breakfast sandwich and a bowl of oatmeal, I bid farewell to my friends and drove off alone, dead set to carve out my own Valentine's Day. I called my mom and grandmother to wish them my love as I left Waterville and then put a Dire Straits tape into the deck.

I headed southeast towards the coast, driving slowly and enjoying the freedom of solitude. After two complete rotations of Brothers In Arms and a half a dozen stops, I stopped at a fork in the road to pick my next move. As the various potential routes percolated through my mind, I looked through my photos on the LCD of my 5D Mark II. At first the red in the images I photographed seemed like a mere coincidence but as the sound of the selection wheel clicking rhythmically continued and the red pixels hopped around the screen with increasing fervor, I had my shivering moment like the first time you share a gaze with a pretty women.

I would live here in a second. Bunker Hill, twenty minutes north of Route 1.

Open Sesame.

I failed to understand my attraction to the red details in the photos I captured, but half way through my explorations, I followed my instincts across the party in search of a pretty girl, except this time I had a my camera in my hand, not a beverage, and was chasing weathered red paint on 100 year old buildings.

Note the hay on the lip of the second level.

Cyclops.

I wouldn't try to jam on that hoop.

Barns look like faces that make me smile.

My favorite red that I saw all day.

The spirit of my Valentine's Day materialized in my capturing of red objects on the Maine countryside with the same uncontrollable attraction that leads men my age to buy flowers and fancy dinners for the special people in their lives.

Here are some more links,
Wearing Red on Valentines Day (Picasa),
Side of the Road (ART).