Perfect Images

[TEND]

Hello my fellow Lit-netters!
I was just thinking, I don't know if I'm the only one but during my day to day life occasionally I see things that are just perfect images where I'm forced to watch. Anyways I'll list a couple of these scenes off the top of my head and hopefully I'm not the only one that's ever experienced this and some of you could share your own examples!

To start it off, once I was driving home from my buddy's ranch. I was on the highway and beside me is the big corral with a couple dozen horses, and I was watching them as I passed and I pulled over to watch for about 15 minutes. It was perfectly flat inside the gate except in the middle (roughly) there was a big hill surrounded by a ditch of water (pretty sure this wasn't man made), and on top of this hill was one horse. There were 20+ horses walking around and all of them grazing here and there as I watched, but this one stood on the hill with his head up, just standing there on the hill. I don't know why, but I just loved what I was watching.

My second example was just a month or so ago when all the geese were flying south for the winter. There were a couple of V's flying past honking, and than one passed over top, and there was one goose flying alone, way off opposite of me, now I don't think I'd ever seen a goose fly alone during the winter. I watched it as it flew with me as I walked, and eventually it went behind a tree and just dissapeared (the only place I figured he could have gone was to either land or go back the way he came).

So, anyways if ANYONE has any idea what I'm talking about, would you mind sharing? :D

[Virgil]

Great images TEND. When I come across one I will post it here. Nice thought for a thread.

[kathycf]

Sometimes in winter here we get icestorms. There will be freezing rain and it coats everything with a thick crust of ice. (on top of the snow that is already there, fun to shovel). One time we had a terrible icestorm and the power lines were down and everything was a big mess. The next day was clear and sunny (albeit pretty darn cold). My town is very hilly and I was driving to work that morning and there was a hill off in front of me, covered with trees coated with ice. The morning sun hit them just right and it looked as if this huge hill was covered with shining crystals or gems. It actually was so brilliant, I had to squint. It made the inconvenience of the afternoon and evening before almost worth it just to see that.

[bluevictim]

Those are cool images, TEND and kathycf. Here are a couple of mine.

There was a time when my daily bike commute passed by a patch of red flowers. Most of the time, it's nothing worth noticing. Every spring, though, when the flowers all bloom, the combined effect of all the red blossoms was unimaginably radiant. I often used to just stop and stare. I swear, I could feel the fiery color on my eyes.

My friends and I were coming back to the car from a day in the mountains, sometime before sunset. Some ominous clouds were closing in. I think this weather system had something to do with the northern sky. It was the most intense blue I had ever seen, natural or artificial. As the sun set, the alpenglow was among the brightest (if not the brightest) I had ever seen, and we just stopped to take it in.

I wish I had pictures, but there is no way any camera could have captured those scenes.

[Laindessiel]

Yes I know what you mean Tend. Like Uncle Virg, I will post them when it occurs to me. I have already had some experiences of wow-look-at-the-beautiful-sky-and-smell-the-flowers but they are always overlooked because maybe I'm too busy to jot it all down and remember them. That's a flaw of mine I'd like to take away from my system.

But I'm telling you that although sometimes I tend to get a little cynical about things, most of the time I am an optimistic person and I see the glass as "half-full" and not half-empty.

[Annamariah]

I know the feeling. Water is something that quite often just forces me to watch it. We have a summer cottage on an island in Lake Päijänne, and I could spend hours just watching how the water changes and what effects light and wind have on it.

Snow is also one thing. I just love when it's dark and you can see snowflakes floating in the light from the lamp posts.

[Pensive]

I wouldn't call it a perfect snene, but still it was an amazing scene. I was on a trip to a Barrage, and there I saw a man taking the donkey, and the donkey was too much loaded, that I got surprised by its courage of how he was bearing all that load. It was so remarkable, I mean the donkey that I took the picture. I have still got that photo with me. But sadly, I don't have a scanner so I can't share it with you people, otherwise I would have loved to do sp.

[OZEED]

Well, my perfect picture might seem a tad bit bias, but it's the closet that I've come to seeing perfection personified.
I remember the day like it was yesterday.
The weather was quite dreary, every single one my family members was on edge, and after about two hours it finally happened.
We got the first little look at my niece, I swear that's the most perfect picture I've ever seen in all my years.
Shes five now, and she has me wrapped around her(cute, perfect,adorable) little finger.

[Jean-Baptiste]

Great thread, Tend!

I don't think this qualifies as perfect, but it was definitely one of the most bizarre things I've ever encountered. I had to stop and stare, until there was nothing left to stare at. I was walking on the deserted main street of my town late at night (one of my former favorite pass-times) and a most unlikely group, engaged in the same activity, passed me crossing the street: (I really feel like I must be making this up, it's been several years, and perhaps my memory has grown feeble) a duck, followed by a duckling, followed by a kitten, followed by a cat. There was no look of malice in the cat, no intent of stalking--they were simply walking, single-file across the street (in the crosswalk!) They passed me without a glance, as though they had been taught, as all city dwellers are, not to make eye contact with people one passes in the street. They completely destroyed my concept of species.

The next one I have may not be perfect either. Not because I don't think it was perfect, but I've always had a difficult time explaining it so that people would see the value in it. I was driving, with a group of friends, in an unknown region (central Saskatchewan) and my passenger was giving me directions to where we were going, and he said to drive straight for a ways until we got to the "ski hill". And I thought for sure he was cracked (if you've ever been there, or seen pictures, you'd know how impossible a ski hill would be to conjure in such a place--flat, flat flat.) But I drove, I drove and drove, until I thought there would be no end to the flat--and then a hole opened in the ground. I had to slow to a crawl; I was shocked that there could be such a massive, hidden landmark as this ski hill. It definitely changed my willingness to make assumptions about directions. I had never thought of an underground ski hill.

[TEND]

in an unknown region (central Saskatchewan)

Thanks for sharing JB! That quote there made me crack up, us Manitobans have so many jokes about Saskatchewan and this was just too good. Yeah, my title is a bit misleading I don't mean 'perfect' I just mean images that you remember that stand out, that make you stop and stare.

I had another one! Except this one made me stop and watch in a depressing way but still in wonder. I was driving down one of the busiest streets (possibly busiest) in the city in the middle of rush hour. By this time in my city, it was dark practically night, there was snow covering the sidewalks and the streets (on the streets it had turned brown from the cars and the exhaust. All you could see, were dozens of cars, bumper to bumper, moving slow as can be with headlights on all blurring together. It just gave me a weird feeling, I just felt so depressed, the feeling I had sitting in my car for an hour and a half in this traffic just added to it, and I thought about how everyone else in the same situation (there were thousands) must be feeling the same way. I don't know how to describe it all that much better, but hope you get the idea.

[kilted exile]

Watching the dawn mist clear up over Loch Katrine. Or the view from the flagpole in Queens Park (Glasgow) - you can see the city around for miles

[Jean-Baptiste]

I was driving to school today, and a strange thing happened. I was turning left through an intersection, and a crow with a walnut in its beak flew over my pickup at a tangent, going the same direction I was turning )\ like so, and it dropped its walnut directly in my path, as though it wanted me to crack it with my tire. The nut bounced out of my path before I got to it, and I thought about backing up and giving it another go, but that's slightly illegal. I thought it a very interesting thing for a crow to do. It surely didn't just drop the nut by accident, nor could it expect the nut to crack on impact, as it flew too close to the ground. This isn't really a perfect image, but I wanted to stop and stare--though it's not actually possible to stop and stare at an event the way one would at a scene.