MM: Luminous

Thanks to random_angel for hosting mono Monday this month and for also taking on the role of host coördinator. This week’s theme is ‘luminous’.

Today, as I was eating lunch, I looked up the theme and started pondering. I ponder quite a bit for those who haven’t noticed. I even looked up synonyms for luminous. I’m also big on alternate meanings for words. I’m really a geek in many ways. (Wasn’t the helicopter on Mars today awesome!) I digress.

Fourth graders (8-9 yr olds) are very keen on giving gifts to their teachers, most notably at Christmas. One of the dads worked at the National Zoo in D.C and I received the most awesome panda sculpture. But the most common gifts I received (all given with love and appreciated) were mugs filled with that awful raspberry-filled candy, baked goods, ornaments and apples. Not real apples. Apples made of all sorts of things: glass, plastic, yarn, marble, drawings, seeds...use your imagination because they certainly did.

The baked goods rarely made it home and although the mugs did, most of the time they didn’t make it into the cupboard. I did save my favorite ornaments and apples. I added one apple to the collection because I couldn’t help myself. I saw a beautiful Waterford one in a shop and saved up to buy it. My condo had floor to ceiling windows and the glass shelves brimmed with apples.

That’s a long way to go to get to the blip. I put the Waterford apple on a chair and the afternoon sun made it glisten. I used my iPhone on portrait mode and took pictures of it in both high and low key. I decided to use the high low key as the blip but will put the other as an extra.

I kept six or seven of my favorite apples when I moved to Arizona. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll do a photo series of them. They remind me of the happiest times in my classroom. It’s so easy for me to forget that I had happy moments in my life. Writing about them brings on a ‘luminescent’ smile.