Big box parking lot discovery

Beige is always beautiful

The scene: July 2020, in a big box retail parking lot on the south end of town.

It's a warm, sunny Saturday evening, and I've come here to pick dinner up for the brood. They eat, apparently, and this parenthood thing means you've got to keep feeding them.

Imagine that.

As I return to the car and carefully place our din inside (chicken wings; please don't judge), I notice a cargo container sitting ignored in the corner of the lot. A nearby store is under renovation, and they're using the bin for recycling.

I fixate on the latching mechanism for a few seconds before I decide it needs a photo.

No, the world doesn't especially need another picture of mundane, beige-painted hardware. But in these early days of the pandemic, I've been taking more and more seemingly stupid pictures because of the way they freeze time.

And this is another moment that seems to merit freezing.

Fast-forward to today, and I don't remember the photo so much as how it felt to be out in these strange times, engaged in an admittedly routine act on behalf of my all-time favorite people back home.

It certainly doesn't reflect the lofty ideals of photography as 15-year-old-me first envisioned when I bought my first serious camera. But life is like that: the world changes around us, so we kind of have to change along with it.

May as well shoot the experience so we remember it more clearly, right?

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