Once you could depend upon me to bear an earnest look and wrap myself in layers of cloth to hide my shame.  The passing decades encrusted me with a forlorn patina, worn copper tinged with the dingy black grime of disuse.  You only needed to raise your voice or turn a certain damning glance in my direction.  I would shrink; I would withdraw.  My own speech recklessly swung between shrill and shy; between demanding and dejected; between condemnation and apology.  

But tonight I drove my car into a fallow field beyond the dumpster on the edge of the community in which I live.  I eased myself from behind the wheel and rested my little camera on the frame of the door.  Heedless to the rising swarm of mosquitoes and the chill of the February Delta, I aimed my lens toward the heavens.  My failing eyes strained to see even the guiding square of the automatic focus but I did not flinch or falter.  I snapped and snapped and snapped while geese rose from the earth and streamed across the sky. bare branches swayed in the biting wind, and birds cooed each other to a soothing sleep.

Then I went home, to my 198-square-foot tiny house on my 50 x 80 lot at the south side of the west half of a twelve-acre trailer park perched beside the banks of the San Joaquin River.  I never felt so fine.  Blame it on the moon.

It’s the sixteenth day of the ninety-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

These are far from professional, but they are mine to share.  There are twenty.  Please enjoy.