November 30, 2008 – Of all of the photos that I take – and that now is thousands – there is no place or picture that touches me more deeply than Kinney Road, where I became serious about photography, and stood with my new camera out in the road, with Izzy, in the dark and cold of winter.
  I don’t know why I love this road, or this farm so much, except that I now understand that artists return to the same subject again and time, time after time, because it touches something in them, and perhaps gives them a way to measure their perspective and progress.
  I felt as if my heart was breaking that night on Kinney Road, and could not imagine why I was so drawn to this place, except that it evokes something in me, the way this simple farm sits up on the crest of a hill and frames the sky and the light. Every time I go there, and I often cry just standing in the road, it opens up something different in me.
  Today, and this week, I have been thinking a lot about friendship. Friendship wise, this has been a remarkable time for me. I found a friend I had lost after a long time, and it has affected my life. An important friendship that seemed to me to be in trouble was revived. And I reconnected with a valued friend I had simply lost touch with in the past year or two, and another I missed called me up tonight and it was appreciated. Last week, I also made a new friend, always a miraculous thing for me.
  I have not been good at keeping friends over my life, I move or change or run away. I seem to have stopped doing that, at least I hope so. Friendship is dear to me, and I value it more all the time. I am working hard to be a good friend, and that sometimes means letting friends love you and care about you, as well as loving and caring about them.
  I have this idea that friendship is different for men than it is for women. When men need friends, they tend to hide from them, I think. They put friends behind work and money and problems. Or are too busy. Shame on us for that.
  This week, I’d like to write about friendship and the subject seems appropriately framed by Kinney Road, which has touched my heart and opened my life as an artist. I gave a photo of one of my Kinney Road farmscapes to one of these friends yesterday and he put it up on his wall, and he perhaps will not ever know how much that means to me.