It wasn’t supposed to rain. “Bedzie pogoda,” everyone says, which is oddly appropriate when literally translated. A word-for-word translation is, “Will be weather”; a less literal reading: “There will be weather.” It seems a little odd: there’s always weather. Still, it’s synonymous with “There will be good weather.”
“Bedzie pogoda.” Not quite. But at the very least, “Bedzie spacer…”
And there will be signs. With two little girls under the age of five, we had to turn it into a game. Easy enough: let’s look for the path marks.
And so off we went. The sequence was simple.
Adult: “I see one.”
Children: “Where?! Where!?”
There were plenty of places they didn’t look but I did — not for signs of course. For something less concrete, literally and figuratively.
In some ways, shooting in heavily overcast conditions is easy: it makes one look less at the sky and thus focus on the things at hand. On the other hand, the light can be, at best, tricky.
Given the wet, slippery conditions, I wasn’t the only one looking down instead of looking up.
Yet the hunt for the signs continued. Through the forest, through the meadow, we looked for the elusive marks. When they became obvious (striped stakes driven into the ground beside the path), the girls become somewhat blind to them.
But the moment of discovery was as exciting for us as the girls.
But for a great deal of the time, it was just walking. As the lingering droplets on the grass made our pants increasingly wet, it started to become a question of plodding.
Finally, we got to the forest, and the “almost” plodding became pure plodding as we slogged our way through mud and up hills, the girls on shoulders or strapped to one’s back.
Once we got back onto the paved path — an oxymoron? — the frustration lifted, as did the clouds.
By the time we returned home, the sun was breaking through the clouds.
It sort of figures.
