Circles.

I missed taking a photo yesterday thanks to the stomach flu. Doing much better today though, so I decided to make up yesterday's post by sharing two photos today from some work I'm doing to teach myself about depth of field.

I love marbles. Love their shine and color; love the sounds they make when they're dumped out of their jar onto the floor, or when they click together quietly as they meet, or when they roll across the floor or careen down a long, winding track (that's what Matthew was doing with them when I took the picture of his feet). I love the beautiful hard, defined boundaries of each sphere in contrast to their swirly, thunderstorm-brewing cloudy insides.

I played with these particular marbles growing up, when we'd go visit my Aunt Faye where she lived on my Grandaddy's farm in South Carolina. My sister and cousins and I would sit on the carpet in her shady, quiet den, and we'd arrange the color-filled marbles into pictures of flowers and butterflies or Santa Claus, then proudly show them to our great Aunt and our mothers and await their praise. When Aunt Faye died some years ago and Dad and Mom helped clean out her house, I asked them if she still had those marbles. She did, and they brought them to me, in the same glass snifter, with the same rusted round metal lid, riding along in a bucket on the floorboard of my parents' car. And now, thirty-something years later, my kids spend happy hours scooping and pouring and sorting and scattering them.