Red Rose Day

The Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart

All things uncomely and broken,
all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway,
the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman,
splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image
that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water,
re-made, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that
blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

W.B Yeats

June 12th is Red Rose Day. I took that luscious-looking picture way back in July 2011.  Browsing through old photos, I see there's almost 16,000 pictures on my MacBook Pro, all obsessively organized by month and year.  Once a librarian, always a librarian. 

On Mac computers, Photos (once called iPhotos) is the library where you store and edit photographs. Actually, Photos does much more than that, including all the organization if you let it, which most people prefer.  I resisted using Photos for a long time, but the Great Apple has a way of bringing you over to their side, like it or not.

For a small monthly fee, you can keep an enormous collection on the iCloud and access the whole mess anywhere on your iPhone or iPad.  It's tedious having a phone shoved under you nose to look at someone's tiny pictures. I'm guilty of this, too. Imagine having 16,000 at your fingertips to torture your friends?

But I've come around to Photos and appreciate the slick new features.  For example, you can instantly search across your entire photo collection with simple keywords, like "flower."  Lo and behold, up pop the thousands of garden and flower pictures I've taken since 2004.

Did I really do all that work? Our garden is still very beautiful, but at the beginning of the century it was almost surreal. Guess I still had the energy for perfection back then.