The title, if there was one, should be “Love Among the Ruins,” and I’m sure I swiped that from someplace in literature. Maybe pop culture. Perhaps another intersection. Source? I’m unsure.
The image is from the San Jose Mission (complex), one of San Antonio’s, arguably the nicest, of the historical missions, which are part of the National Parks’ jurisdiction. Shared. In part. Something.
The image was on a spring-like afternoon, I’ll guess, judging from the overcast sky, and probably hot out, and I was most likely wearing shorts. None of that is news. The delicate, I-don’t-know-the-biological-name, paper-like, petal-like “flowers” of the Bougainvillea caught my eye, and that’s the source of the image.
Backlit. The first time I saw a backlit flower like that, the first time it captured my imagination; although, I failed to render it in an adequate digital image, was close to Big Bend (THE Big Bend, Rio Grande, TX). Ocotillo, flowering after a freak fall rain, delicate flowers, in a valley, backlit by the mid-morning winter’s sun.
Nowadays, I travel with a camera, or two, and I snap whatever catches my eye, as an exercise. Occasionally, an image like that turns up.
Laeti edimus qui nos subigant!
Two Meat Tuesday (the book)
astrofish.net
Pink Cake A commonplace book.
The only “Love Among the Ruins” I know about is a poem by Robert Browning that we had to read, senior year (I think) in High School. I liked the imagery in it, so vivid you could picture it in your mind (helped that I lived on a farm in rural Connecticut)–the first verse evoked a world we saw every day, with the bones of the earth heaped in stone walls to clear the ground for planting, old houses and trees standing mute testimony to early American life. In my mind’s eye, I have a snapshot of that world, now long gone (for me). I’ll never go there again.
I understand that there are books and films with the same title, but I don’t know about any of them.