Since January of 2021, I’ve been doing these weekly photographic challenges over at 52 Frames. The month of May has not been my strongest; a couple of my entries were half-hearted, due to illness or prioritization of other things. Nevertheless, I am pleased to continue my streak for another month and to unpack the results.

After all, there were five Sundays in May, and therefore five challenges. They can’t all be that bad. Can they?!

Lying within easy reach of Seattle, Wallace Falls State Park is nothing if not popular. On the edge of the Cascades, it offers visitors lovely views of a series of cascading waterfalls.

I paid it a visit on a Sunday in late March. Was it worth my while?

Spoiler: yes.

I’m sure that my readers are on the edge of their seats, desperately awaiting a review of the book I was reading while waiting for a tire patch at the Les Schwab in Salem, Oregon.

Well, it took me a month to get around to hitting the “publish” button, so I hope it was worth the wait! As bonus, I am also including in a review of the book I was reading before that one too.

Both these books came out in 2019, and both are about Uzbekistan. The two present very different views from the same(-ish) “country” roughly a hundred years apart. They are both fascinating reads that I would highly recommend to anyone who is interested.

The first, Bagila Bukharbayeva’s The Vanishing Generation is a take on religious persecution under the Islam Karimov-led government. I became aware of it through a glowing review on Eurasianet, and added it to my reading list.

The second, Night and Day by Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon is a turn of the century Uzbek novel, recently translated into English by Christopher Frost. I became aware of it as it was the second in series on “Central Asian Literatures in Translation”. I had adored the first book in the series, which led me to be quite intrigued as to the second.

Full thoughts follow.

One of the unsung vermin of American city life is the rabbit. I feel like I see them skulking about at night, crossing the roads now and then, wherever I am, from Pittsburgh to Seattle.

Increasingly, as spring has sprung, I’ve been seeing rabbits running about near the Seattle sidewalks. Sometimes at day, sometimes at night.

Never before though, have I spotted one from outside my home office window, popping by to provide a lot of entertainment before a discussion about what would make us feel successful at work. It was humongous, and it ate a leaf.

I had a camera at arm’s reach, and I pointed it out the window with reckless abandon, not realizing it was stopped down and photographing with a slow, slow shutter speed. The sort that cannot cope with subject movement from a fast paced bunny rabbit.

We are surrounded by history.

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, the same ground on which we tread has been walked on by generations before us, whether or not they are traditionally acknowledged in history books. History extends to the natural history of other species’ before man, and geologic history before that.

And from that rousing paragraph of platitudes, we bring ourselves to… Valley Forge.

If the Philadelphia suburbs should boast any site of historical mythmaking, it’s most certainly Valley Forge, the location of an encampment where General George Washington and his troops spent the winter of 1777-8.