first and foremost i would like to express my most heartfelt gratitude to everyone for your sympathies and outreach during my time of dealing with the death of my father. your comments on my last post and all your comments on tims posts with regards to my dad. i shed many tears of sorrow but at the same time of amazement at how wonderful you folks really are. i know we dont really know eachother, yet we bond in our common affection of photography and we do bare our souls when we post pictures, it shows a piece of who we are to the world. in a sense we are a family. so again, thank you. this time of year at my other home (where i grew up), everything is dead and dismal,so in a way was appropriate for that journey. what a bittersweet journey it was. my mom turned 80 on the same day that we buried my dad. she has Alzheimer's and didnt really know it was her birthday or that we were saying goodbye to dad. she wanted to know when he was coming back from the store. shes not sure who i am, but whomever i am to her, i know that she trusts and loves me.i was able to get out a couple times to my old haunts and got a couple photos. maybe its the time of year or it was my frame of mind,or a combination of both but everywhere i went, all i saw was, death, old, and forgotten. my next couple post will reflect that, then im ready to move on. im glad to be back and ready to start living in the now!