Memory stream : "Number One"

west coker | kodak cx7530

I got my first camera in December of 2005 and had taken a few photos here and there but none with the intent of shooting for myself as a form of expression or even pleasure, more just to point and shoot and show people "back home" where I lived. This was April of 2006, the sixth if I can remember correctly, on a day that I had actually written about extensively on myspace - the deletion of which I regret immensely considering I never saved harder copies of all those entries. Dumb. Stupid.
It was the first day I ever took a camera out and said "I am going to go and take pictures", and this was the first exposure, a relatively close copy of all those moody tree photos I had seen on google images or something. When I got back to our cottage thing I showed my mom the screen and said "Look! it looks like a photograph!". I set the camera to black and white for the majority of the time, actually almost all of the time. The only albums I have saved before I came back in the summer of 2006 are almost all completely monochromatic. I can't tell whether that's good or bad. Maybe bad.
As for the sixth of April the only truly redeeming quality about that day, as I walked up behind the butcher's to cross the street into the fields was that, as I wrote, I felt a calm breeze brush by me and imagined California - as I always have and maybe always will. That California breeze, the west coast calm. The persistence of memory or perhaps my first real adventure into nostalgia, taking photos for the future while remembering the past. There are photos after this one, some of more trees, winding pathways, a bench. I went back up there twice, maybe three times more before I left West Coker 2 months later.