This video from the Smithsonian Magazine showcases some of Eudora Welty’s photographs of Mississippi during the Depression, with commentary by friends and scholars including Reynolds Price and Robert MacNeil. They’re interesting, but I really just like to watch the photographs drift by.

Eudora Welty as Photographer — “Photographs by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Eudora Welty display the empathy that would later infuse her fiction” (By T.A. Frail; Smithsonian Magazine; April, 2009)

I took this picture of my dog Nina three years ago and posted it on Flickr. I love the expression on her face, and the way the draped towel makes her look like the Virgin Mary. It wasn’t posed, I was drying her off in the bathtub, turned to get another towel to wrap her in and lift her out, and caught the expression on her face, and grabbed the camera.

I haven’t looked at this in a while, but it yesterday it received an invitation to put it in the Flickr group Wrapped Canines. This is what I love about Flickr, there’s a group for everything. There isn’t one dog group, there are dozens of dog groups, each with its own style or topic. There are general dog groups like Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!, with nearly 60,000 members and over 500,000 photos, and groups for specific types of pictures: Dog-Tired for sleeping dogs, Dogs in Lakes and Dogs in Pools, groups for specific breeds from Bernese Mountain Dogs to Shih Tzu Central, and much, much more.

Wrapped Canines is a group for a very specific type of photo: “Dogs in towels, dogs in hoods, dogs in blankets, dogs peeking out from behind curtains and drapes, dogs who are partially visible due to their involvement in fabric.” But apparently that’s not specific enough, because the group’s admin needed to add “Please, no dogs merely sitting on top of the bed – must be wrapped. Any costumes, please have a wrap, hood, or drape effect to it.” I understand this — I run 23 of my own groups on Flickr, and you wouldn’t believe how people try to push the boundaries.

I added my picture of wrapped Nina to the group, and spent way too much time looking at everyone else’s pictures of much-loved dogs draped in towels, blankets and scarves. Silly and cute stuff– definitely raised my mood!

Dandelions are such cheerful little flowers, bright spots of sunshine against the green lawn. They are perfect for young children, small and easy to handle, with soft stems that are easy to pick. People hardly ever let us pick the flowers from their gardens, and those flowers always seemed to have thorns or tough stems that needed to be cut with some sharp instrument anyway. But the dandelions were free, scattered around everywhere, as long as you got to them before your dad mowed the lawn, and the moms all seemed to love receiving these little bouquets.

Then came the day I heard someone say that dandelions were weeds. What are weeds, I wanted to know? I thought it must be a particular type of flower, the weed family, but my father told me that weeds were plants that were unwanted. Why, I wondered, were dandelions unwanted? Because they were weeds. This made no sense to me, dandelions are unwanted because they are weeds, and they are weeds because they are unwanted.

I became ashamed of my dandelion bouquets. I could see that all the moms saying, “Oh, how pretty!” were just pretending. I could see that the dads were making little jokes about our dandelion bouquets, because they didn’t really want the pretty little flowers in dotting their lawns anyway. I decided that when I grew up, I would have a dandelion garden, and no one could call my dandelions weeds because they were growing right where they were supposed to be. I imaging ripping orchids out of my dandelion garden and people being shocked. (I had no idea what orchids actually were, I just knew that on TV and in comic books, “orchid” meant rich people’s flowers, like caviar and pheasant under glass meant rich people’s food.) “Sorry!” I would say, “this is a dandelion garden, so those fancy orchids are weeds here!”

I thought about this yesterday. I was at Glen Magna in Danvers, an old estate which has lovely, well-tended lawns and gardens, and growing out of a brick wall, I saw a single dandelion, probably the only one on the property. I don’t know how it sneaked in, but I thought it gave a homey touch to the place. Later, I was near another historical property, Smith Barn in Peabody, and was thrilled to see thousands of dandelions, growing all over the orchards. Just beautiful! I now feel like I have seen the dandelion garden of my dreams.

Photograph by Nickolas Muray for McCall Style and Beauty, George Eastman House on Flickr

Day 20: January 20, 2010
I’ve had dogs pretty much my whole life, but Nina is the first dog I’ve had since I got my first digital camera ten years ago. I only have a few pictures of each of my other dogs, and well over a hundred of Nina. I have pictures of her asleep and awake, on the beach, in the car, in the snow, on the couch, everywhere. She’s a well-documented dog.

I have pictures of Nina on my phone, on my screensaver, on Flickr, on Facebook, on postcards and on my wall. Because of this, I see her face and think of her more, perhaps, than any of my other dogs. I love her, but I also loved all the dogs of my past: Taxi, Sidney, Skippy, Pal and Terry. Do I love Nina more? I don’t know, but I think I love her differently because I have taken so many pictures of her. The act of taking a photograph focuses my attention on her, and love thrives on attention.

So here you go, Nina — you’re my photo of the day.

Day 14: January 14, 2010
Irving’s Toy & Card Shop
71 Harvard Street
Brookline, Massachusetts

I love this local landmark, a tiny building tucked in between two much-larger buildings. This old-fashioned store and its elderly owner Mrs. Ethel Weiss is featured in the Beacon Street Girls children’s books.

According to a 1993 article in the Hartford Courant, this is the site of the candy store where the young John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his brother Joseph stole a pair of "Groucho Marx-like false glasses, nose and moustache."

Day 13: January 13, 2010

Day 12: January 12, 2010
In desperate need of some color, I bought myself a bunch of flowers at the supermarket.

Day 11: January 11, 2010
Just another picture of the cemetery I drive past nearly every day. I took it on my lunch hour. Less than two weeks into this year’s attempt at doing the photo-a-day thing, and I feel like I’m running out of steam. The weekends are fine, it’s the workdays that are so difficult in the long, dark winter. But I’m determined to do really try this year!

In Flanders Field
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

When I was a child, my parents had an old recording of this song and I loved it’s rousing, patriotic cheerfulness, sending the boys off to the War to End All Wars. But in school my teacher recited In Flanders Field to the class, and I found the middle verse chilling: “We are the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…” I still do, and think of it every time I read more young men and women going off to war and dying.

Over There, by George M. Cohan, sung by Arthur Fields, Columbia A2470, recorded in 1917, from the 78RPM Collection on the Internet Archive