Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Yellow shopping carts in a frozen parking lot

Just pick one
Dryden, ON
January 2023
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Shooting the ordinary has always been a bit of a thing for me. I call them in-between moments, when you’re busy going through the motions of everyday life and you want to remember the minutiae that would otherwise slip unnoticed into the past.

No one’s going to wax poetic about a line of yellow shopping carts in a frozen parking lot in northwestern Ontario. At least that’s not what we’ve been taught.

Instead, we’ve been conditioned to zero in on the spectacular and the familiar. Think CN Towers and Niagara Falls instead of railway repair equipment and grasses growing in ditches.

But when we root through the photos, we end up with lots of CN Towers and Niagara Falls. Which might make it seem like that’s all there is when that’s not the case at all.

In between high-profile visits to tall towers and dangerous waterfalls, we eat, walk, work, drive, ride, and play. We wander the streets and hang out beside bay windows. We talk with friends and smile at strangers.

We live in the everyday, and I’d argue all of these otherwise trivial moments are every bit as meaningful to us as the big, spectacular ones are.

So in my world, they merit some photographic attention, too. In my world, we absolutely wax poetic about yellow shopping carts.

Because despite our having been conditioned to overlook the ordinary, it’s precisely these ordinary things that trigger the memories that make life that much richer.

We’ve shopped here with our son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. We’ve made memories here. This place holds a tiny but important spot in our family’s collective memory.

And all it takes is a silly picture to trigger these and other memories.

Hardly seems ordinary at all, then, does it?

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