Thursday, August 29, 2024

Tea time in a Tim Horton's parking lot

Recyclable-plastic Canadiana
Morrisburg, ON
August 2024
This photo originally shared on Instagram

We’ve been on the road all day, headed back to our onetime hometown for a long-overdue visit.

Traffic on Canada’s busiest highway has been insane, with accidents, construction, speed traps, and a fully engulfed truck fire. No injuries, thank goodness, but still.

We pull into an OnRoute rest stop to refuel Stella (sorry, Debbie’s car) and ourselves. After the good folks at the Tim Horton’s coffee shop take pity on us and share their caffeine, we head back into the early evening sun.

As we walk through the parking lot, now covered in deep shadows, I’m hit by a photographic brainstorm. We load the car up and I engage in a bit of carside still-life photography while my ever so patient wife smiles sardonically and waits for me to shoot yet another weird photo.

Strangers stare that odd stare that we’ve seen so many times before.

I take one image and am immediately happy with the result because it telegraphs a moment with her that I’m not ready to forget. Whether the day is easy or hard or somewhere in between, I’ve been using strange pics as placeholders for as long as I’ve known her. And she’s never failed to understand the why.

This day has been a hard one. Challenge lays ahead of us, at the other end of the long road where we now find ourselves. But somehow, a simple timeout from the grinding trip reminds me - indeed us - why even the most difficult moments are to be cherished just as much as the easiest ones.

Photography as road trip catharsis sounds reasonable to me.

#morrisburg #ontario #canada #onroute #parkinglot #stilllife #highway #roadtrip #travel #timhortons #apple #iphone #shotoniphone #photography

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