Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Tag: summer

  • It was a good summer

    It was a good summer, despite the coronavirus.

  • Winter’s a comin’

    We’re getting in as much social contact as we can, as safely as we can, now — before winter makes that nigh onto impossible.

  • Beautiful for the moment, but soon withered and fallen and swept away by the wind

    People say that the best camera is the one you have with you, but I don’t go all the way in on that. The camera I always have with me is my iPhone, first a 5 and now a 6s. Both have been fine for everyday snapshots — far better than any snapshot camera I…

  • What I did on my summer vacation

    It feels like summer break is ending today. It’s because when I was a kid, school started the day after Labor Day (as God intended). Even though I haven’t been in school in decades, today still feels like the end of summer break to me! But this year, I really did get a summer break, thanks to my employer realizing the first…

  • Summer flowers on Kodak Ektachrome E100G

    For my birthday this year my mom bought me a bunch of new flowering plants for my front garden. She did most of the work planting them, too. What a nice gift! I so enjoy walking through my garden for a minute before I get in the car to go to work. I pull off a…

  • You probably wouldn’t do the things you say you’d do if only you had more time

    The tiger lilies and the phlox in my front garden always bloom last. Their annual emergence is my sure sign summer is here. The days on either side of solstice are my favorite time of year. The days last so long, with 15 hours of glorious daylight. It’s usually temperate in Indiana, with highs in the 70s…

  • Flowers marking the passage of spring

    A woman named Verna built my home and lived in it for more than 30 years. My neighbor tells me that a few years before she fell ill and died, she landscaped the yard. The house became a rental for several years after that, and her beds got little love from tenants. When I moved in,…

  • Gleich aus Deutschland zurück, 30 Jahre her

    I spent my 16th summer in Germany. I was in an intensive language-immersion program through Indiana University that gave me a stunning command of the German language. I came away so fluent that even though I’ve had little call to speak German in 25 years and have forgotten a lot of vocabulary, when I encounter a native German speaker…

  • Finally appreciating autumn

    Work has been consuming me lately and it’s left me with less time to write. It’s time for my annual meditation on autumn, but this year I’m getting this 2010 post out of the archives and running it again. The coming of autumn has always made me grumpy. It means winter is around the corner,…

  • Bike rides and ice cream

    I enjoyed this summer more than any summer in recent memory. I took plenty of walks, visited plenty of places with my camera in hand, spent plenty of evenings on the deck reading, and took plenty of weekend day trips. The one thing I didn’t do until just the other day, however, is ride my…

  • Frozen glue

    A rerun, from 2010. For ten minutes one afternoon in 1986, I thought I had killed a little girl. I worked my 19th summer for my aunt Betty’s delivery service. Her small company shuttled papers, packages, and supplies  for industrial clients all over northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan. She did a good business with maybe…

  • Not squandering summer

    Summer begins when school ends. It’s so in my middle age as it was in my childhood, but only because I have children. Otherwise, I would neither know nor care when school ends. I wonder how I’d know it was summer. As a boy, I knew how to get the most out of summer. It…