I am a writer but on my desk-top computer I have about 20,000 photos. You do the math on what they say about every picture being worth a thousand words, or as Rod Stewart says, every picture tells a story. Most of my photographs were taken while traveling. Most aren't very good in the way photographers measure quality, but most serve my purpose: reminding me of where I have been and what the place looked like and what I experienced. More than a few have prompted their requisite word count. Sometimes the images even announce how I felt or what I thought without the words. Once I've returned the ones I view most often seem to set off flares of irony or humor, and remind me somehow that I caught a moment and I can always return. Since coming home I've also been reading some of the best travel writing about Croatia and, of course one of my most literate friends suggested I dip into Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an impossibly long (1100 pages) journey through old Yugoslavia in the 1940s. Rebecca West and her husband followed our exact route-- by train from Germany, through Zagreb, and on to Split and the Adriatic coast. I dipped in up to my neck. The book is stunning. She described Trogir, a city we visited, this way: "Trogir ... covers a minute island, lying close to the coast, in the lee of a larger island. It is one of those golden-brown cities: the colour of rich crumbling shortbread, of butterscotch, of the best pastry, sometimes of good undarkened gravy. It stands naked and leggy, for it is a walled city deprived of its walls... Now it looks like a plant grown in a flower-pot when the pot is broken but he earth and roots still hang together." I hope, if I work at it, I can write a poem or paragraph that descriptive. But until then, I'll flip through the photos and thumb through my journal. None of my photographs are as good as that paragraph, but I'd like to end my week of blogging with these images anyway.
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