It’s been raining regularly this summer and all the plants and trees are growing, as they say in Holland, like cabbage. As is the cabbage. And the buttercups. It’s the summer of this aptly named “little frog” flower, ranunculus, which likes water. A golden opportunity, a punster might say. Being a photographer is a heavy responsibility and I confess to having failed miserably on the buttercup front.

There was around the corner a field of yellow so lovely it made me weep with the memories of the best that summer can bring us: of summer days and school vacations; of taking a brief rest in an Alpine meadow; of poring over the field guide to wildflowers on rainy days and carefully laying the thus identified specimen between two sheets of clean paper in the notebook that surely would be filled and become a memento for when the rain pouring down on November days — never to be looked at again, but instead found decades later when sorting through the life of she who carefully rescued the young girl’s first attempts at capturing the rich emotions brought forth by a summer meadow, and in turn evoking a wave of grief and happiness so strong it took my breath away.

It begged to be photographed at dawn or dusk to catch thousands of shiny petals in the slanted light. Despite the risk of getting maudlin. In this case it would be dusk, due to the orientation of the field and the row of trees and road on the eastern edge. I could not go that lovely evening, for a reason long forgotten, but planned to go there at the first opportunity.

Followed by days and days of blah grey skies. It coulda been Holland — where, however, the blah grey skies are interspersed with the most fantastic displays of sunset you’ve ever seen. As you can see in Dutch landscape paintings. We don’t have that in New England, which makes days of grey tougher to tolerate somehow. But that is an aside that diverts us from the sad tale I have to tell, for the endless rain did in my field of buttercups.

I failed miserably as a photographer, wouldn’t you say? To make up for it, I chased up and down for buttercups, morning and day, singly and in field. Which was easy as they were all over the place. Were. Had been. It never did happen again, that magic moment. That’s because  it was a magic moment. And like novelists, we photographers are in the business of either chronicling and showing, or manufacturing and sharing magic moments. So here’s some manufactured magic.

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