In the week following school year-end and the beginning of summer school break, my wife, my daughter and I find ourselves in Edmonton. A Sunday afternoon becomes opportunity for me to look around Edmonton with fresh eyes, this city I knew as child and youth, this city I grew up in. In my travels, parts of the city receive spitting of rain from moisture-laden skies, stacking cumulus clouds pushed across Edmonton by substantial summer winds. Less windy and wet moments provide opportunity to use clouded skies as backdrop to architecture and landscape. I’m needing to fall into sync with the opportunity of/for photos and the cadence of parking and getting out of the vehicle for possible photos.

Alongside the Anthony Henday roadway near Callingwood Avenue in Edmonton’s west-end, in a farmer’s field, on the other side of fenced, barbed-wire an older truck is parked, a truck that is likely to be a 1949 Chevrolet half-tonne with grain box, a vehicle that if rehabilitated could become vintage and a classic. The intention, as I’ve watched through these ten years, had been to use the retro look of this vintage truck with the side panels of the grain box to advertise location of a knick-knacks store in this west-end community. That store no longer exists and no one has set about moving the truck or dismantling the grain box and advertising. Erosion – rain, sun, snow and wind – has brought the grain box down and rusting to the truck’s body and cab has added deep, rough, orange peel texture to this truck’s exterior … all becoming fodder for photos.

Listening to – Jack White’s version of a U2 tune, ‘Love is Blindness,’ and the Tijuana Brass – ‘Lonely Bull,’ ‘Spanish Flea,’ ‘Taste of Honey,’ and ‘Tijuana Taxi.’

Quote to Inspire – “We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were. We don’t know these lost people but if you look around, you’ll find someone just like them.” – Gene McSweeney