Little Chunks Of Memory

While preparing these images to post, it struck me how vividly I was able to remember in almost every instance, where I had taken the picture.

At the time (May and June, 2010) I was training for the Avon Walk For Breast Cancer in Santa Barbara. I was making a deliberate effort to walk in as many varied neighborhoods as I could around my house and office, largely in an effort to avoid being bored to tears.

I was also doing my “Picture A Day” challenge at that time, so to kill two birds with one stone, I would carry a camera with me on my walks and look for interesting things to take pictures of. (Needless to say, there’s a huge difference in training for a marathon walk as opposed to training for a marathon run. Among other things, while training for a marathon walk you have plenty of time to stop and snap pictures.)

In looking at these pictures (and the others in this series) I can still tell you pretty much exactly where they were taken, despite the fact that many of them were taken off on some side street I probably had never been on before and never been on since. The fuzzy desert plants (sixth picture down) were on a side street near Burbank and Woodlake, close to El Camino High School. The morning glories (fifth one down) were over on Ingomar, near Hillary. The jacarandas (seventh one) were a block away from my office in Encino. The single rose sticking up out of the ferns (I loved the contrast in color) were on one of the cul-de-sacs near Lazy J Ranch Park. The orange rose (last one) was just sticking up over a wall along Valley Circle near the baseball fields, and I had to hold my camera up over the wall to take the picture.

But half the time I can’t remember what I had for dinner two days ago, or where I put that screwdriver… The brain is a funny thing.