Pasture Down the Road

I pass back and forth by this simple pasture every day - coming and going, to work and back home, out to trade or to shop, off to meet or make friends. About a mile down the road from our place toward town (Youngsville) after a sharp downhill double S curve sits this expansive stretch of pastured land. Sometimes fallow, sometimes idle waiting for the grasses to return, sometimes with its cows and calves grazing and lounging, sometimes with twenty or more doe and fawn taking their turn at foraging but always catching my eye, my heart, my soul. It is not my land but this little glimpse close to the road of the edge of hundreds of acres over the rise helps define my home, my place on earth.

This solitary oak sits as it has for more than a hundred years reflecting the changing seasons and variations of these themes - stark through winter, coming forth in late spring, swaying to storms in the heat of the North Carolina summers and dying back in fall. Makes me smile every time I get close. Over time, I hope to use it as a touchstone or marker, to show the elegance of the fields, of this place and obviously to photograph it more accurately.