I didn’t get much of a summer this year. The first of it was spent getting ready to sell a house, find a house, and buy a house. The middle was spent cleaning up storm damage and packing a house. And the last of it was spent moving, unpacking and trying to settle into a house. Not that I would trade any of it (well, maybe the storm part), but I did miss getting to do some of the things that make summer my favorite.
If last summer was our slow and simple summer, this summer was anything but. Fortuantely even with everything else going on I did still manage to squeeze in a couple of things that allowed me to stop and enjoy the season, even if just for an hour or two; like the day the boys and I went to the farm to pick berries, or the night I visited my friend Josh out in Colonial Beach.
Colonial Beach, for those not familiar, is a quaint little beach town on the Potomac, about an hour east of Fredericksburg. When I first moved to Virginia the idea of a beach on the Potomac was laughable to me, despite having grown up in a small town in north Georgia that had a “beach” on a tiny manmade lake. I guess I thought that elsewhere in the world the word beach was reserved for something more like what you find on the coast. (And to be fair, when I first moved to Virginia I lived in Arlington, just across the river from DC. The Potomac there doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being something you’d want to swim in; it more or less has the reputation of being, well, disgusting.)
But I had heard enough about Colonial Beach to put it on my short list. Josh had just moved there a few weeks before, and invited me to come hang out for the evening, with my camera. I always love hanging with Josh, for so many reasons, but among them is that Josh is also a photographer (and a talented one at that.)
The great thing about hanging with another photographer is that they get it. They understand the stopping in the middle of a sentence, or the middle of a street. They understand that sometimes you need to stand in one place and compose, and recompose, a shot multiple times before you press the shutter button, or that you may need to retreat into your own head for a moment and give your full attention to the scene in front of you. Where even your most supportive family and friends begin to get exasperated that you’re making another image, another photographer will wait patiently. Or wander off to make their own photograph knowing that you’ll catch up, and the conversation will pick right back up where you left off.
We spent the afternoon wandering the streets around the town, along the beach and then along some of the residential streets and over to the marina, mostly with our lenses pointed in totally different directions. And as often happens when Josh and I hang out our low key evening turned into quite the adventure, when what started as looking for a place to grab some food ended in ice cream for dinner and beer for dessert. No complaints here. But word to the wise, if you visit Colonial Beach you should know that everything, and I do mean everything (except the ice cream place) is closed on Tuesday.