Today seems to be lessons day. I am going to Manchester, Vt. this afternoon to get my weekly photography lesson from Christine Glade, a photographer who is showing me how to control my camera, understand light, think more about my photos. She thinks I have some promise and she says if I don’t do my shutter speed before the lesson, we will do it in class. I have always had this same relationship with teachers, and I am working to transcend it. We get each other, I think. I love the lessons, and am learning a lot. After that, I’m picking up the “Chicken, Fox and Farmer” notecards but Maria might put off selling them for a few days, or maybe not. You can check her  website.

Other great news. Tomorrow, the legendary photographer George Forss, whose work is shown and sold by the Park Slope Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. (I have bought one of his photographs and am going to New York on May 7 to pick it up and bring it home) is coming to the farm  and we are going to go out together and do some landscape shooting. George has an art gallery in Cambridge, N.Y. His black-and-white New York City urban landscapes are astonishing, and I am so excited to be riding around with him and watching and learning from him. Digital photography is very different from the work he has done – much of the paper and equipment he uses is becoming unavailable. Digital photography is so different – George has made his own cameras and used different kinds of optics in his work. He does not use autofocus.

Lessons come in many different forms, too. Life is as sad as you want to make it. Or as happy. I just had no idea that Izzy was sick.