off season Just now laughing children, ball games, gelato-licking teenagers, well-fed, suntanned bodies lazing in the sun, chilled champagne bottles shaded under umbrellas, the nightly drone of disco. But the end of vacation is drawing close, the farewell certain. Late-fall empties the beaches. Discos fall silent. Dance floors stay devoid of dancers. Families with school-age children are homeward bound, traveling north. Along their journey, they cross paths with southbound migratory birds, year after year. Off season. Every year the same closing ritual of the lifeguards: power-washing the beach chairs and parasols, dry-docking the pedal boats, boarding up beach cottages to protect them from the expected winter storms. In the village the stores close; the shuttered newsstand has no new headlines to offer; the bus starts operating on a reduced schedule. A mild autumn sun sinks blood red into the evening haze hovering above the water. Waves flatten the children’s sand castles. I have wrestled with this sea—so long ago! Today I use my camera to ward off melancholy sadness. Why can nothing ever stay the same! The aesthetic form of my images mirrors these wistful feelings. Increasingly, I reach for the wide-angle lens. The world recedes. Stretches of water and sand. Empty rooms. The wide-angle lens renders the shoreline crooked, bulges the horizon, gives the earth back its curves and shrinks it. And this lens puts me back into my insignificant place. Off season. This is who I am, standing there, feet in the water. Swirling waves between my legs, each wave a new memory. The water washes the sand out from under my feet. I sink, lose my balance. Whatever I captured with my camera, was it more than surface? Will it have been more than superficiality? Time is fleeting; at first analog, now digital. I can’t help thinking of the many people in my pictures who are already gone. My photos are like footprints in the sand. Each new tide erases them mercilessly. The pictures left to me are of hulls hollowed out by elapsing time, are empty husks. And still, comes next fall, I will be back, camera in hand. As long as I am given the chance, I will take pictures.