The Limits of Memory

HPIM3510

You have insufficient memory.

Deadpan.  As if no irony were involved, my computer informed me it had aborted the task of uploading digital pictures.

I don’t ask that much of my computer, but there you have it.

I had amassed more than 1300 photos on my wee camera.  Too many pictures, with nowhere to go.

At first my rapidly antiquating computer flashed a sign that I was low on memory.  Then, having failed to get a reaction from me, it balked like a testy toddler and shut itself down, refusing to even consider loading another picture until I cleared space on my hard drive.

The only way to do this was, at long last, to go through the archives and dispense with the over and under-lit shots, the closed eyes, the needless near-identical extras.  The pictures that simply were not special enough to occupy space in my memory.

I should have known this would be . . .  problematic. Continue reading “The Limits of Memory”

Where Heaven Meets the Earth and Sea

At the spot in Dublin where a small seashell filled with Jim’s ashes wafted into the sea, a tiny spray of them lifted by a breeze into an arc that glittered in the rising sun, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish heaven from earth, or earth from the sea.
I looked at the blush sea and sky “as the sea’s own beat resumed and made him part of the cadence of its waves,
. . .turquoise with rolling white tops.”
Many of my own words will follow in future posts about our travels, but for now I’ll share some of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s:
Ireland 1524
See the mountains kiss high heaven
   And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
   If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
   And the moonbeams kiss the sea. . . 

 

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