We will never be as young as we are tonight.
The sun is low over the meadow. It is the end of summer, and everything here has already ripened and dried: the reeds, the grasses, the tall stems that bowed all season long. The year is passing its height, and in the middle of the field stands a girl crowned by it.
Her crown is a sun made of what the summer left behind. Plumes of dry grass rise around her head like rays; burrs and thistle heads are woven into her golden curls; violet ribbons wind about her like the orbits of planets. A white collar opens around her face like a flower. For one evening she is queen of the meadow, the centre around which its whole season turns.
She knows it. That is why her gaze is so calm and so attentive. Youth always wears a crown made of things already fading, and its radiance is the radiance of the last hour before sunset. Tomorrow the field will still be the same field. She will not be the same girl.
The wind is already rising. One by one it lifts the seeds from her crown and carries them across the field, and she does not try to stop it. This is the secret the meadow has kept all summer: what dries is not lost. Every plume that leaves her crown tonight will rise as grass next spring, in a field where no one will remember her. Youth does not last. It is sown.
"Only the young see life ahead of them, and only the very old see it behind; those in between are too busy living to see anything at all."
— after Ray Bradbury
Value your time.
The first half of a diptych: here the heroine reveals herself; in Imagination she acts, sending the magic ship of imagination out to sea.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2014.)
