Our little boy has found out that he has grown enough to lift the hook on the door to the tractor shed – which was beyond his reach when we visited here in the summer – and spent half an hour today lifting it up, opening the door, looking inside, shutting the door and lowering the hook. 

It’s autumn holiday this week in Eastern Norway, the traditional ‘potato holiday’ during which school children got time off to harvest potatoes with their family for the coming winter. We’re spending the week in the countryside, and the days fly by in a blur of sunlight, apple picking and relaxed meals.

We were met off the train when we arrived by G’s aunt, who took us back to her place to serve us a perfectly seasonal meal of mutton fricassée followed by a variety of tilslørte bondepiker made from oatmeal which had been fried with butter and sugar and was served with whipped cream and apple jam (homemade the day before with apples from the garden).

The weather is fair but a lot colder than at home; temperatures are dropping below zero at night and we have our wollen clothes out (which the boy and I live in from October through March). Even though we were a bit cold on the first night here while the heating kicked in properly, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world when the sun came out on the morning after and lit the frosty grass. 

I didn’t bring any other camera than my phone this week, but even so I am shooting more now than I have for quite some time; the sunlight and the autumn landscapes combined with a new phone (Samsung again) makes for a ton of inspiration. Looking through my photos so far I see a lot of perfect autumn memories in the making, but of course not everything is perfect. We all three of us have a cold, which means we are sleeping badly, and tired people have tempers. The boy, while not yet at the worst tantrum stage, is a toddler with all that entails (including destructive capabilities).

However such imperfections are dealt with, artistically and emotionally, I strongly believe that they must not be ignored but rather picked up and examined, and either accepted or changed to the best of one’s ability. Maybe my photography ought to reflect these imperfections, but I am not comfortable with displaying that level of vulnerability even in the images that I don’t intend to share online – but then again maybe it doesn’t matter as long as there is emotion in the images I do shoot.

~ All the best from Jenny Graver.