Garden Study (First Snow), 2008

There is a narrow strip of earth, no more than 18 inches wide, between the driveway & my Portuguese neighbor's garage that he uses as a sort of nursery & propagation area. Most things move on to either his salad bowl or a useful death & potential rebirth in his compost heap but occasionally a cutting sprouts roots & survives. He is nothing if not determined & has promised me a fig tree if any of the twigs strike root. (As decorative & art historically significant as I find fig leaves; I'm not tremendously optimistic…) However, the really intriguing thing about his little horticultural experiments is the manner in which, quite inadvertently, he manages to create these bizarre structuralist, often surreal, tableaux utilizing an astoundingly eclectic assortment of twigs, sticks, string, decaying vegetation & yes, chunks of concrete… You've surely noticed; I've been photographing sections of them all summer. Of course that is not what this photo is about. This is documentation of the winter's first ever-so-light dusting of snow.

It's that faint, white bit on the ground.