The slowest summer

It all started with foraging. We love to sip on elderberry syrup and water, served over ice in the summer, and are lucky to have an elderberry growing right next to our home. Every year, in late spring, my partner picks beautiful white blooms from it and turns them into the most delicately flavoured syrup. This year, he got a little more adventurous than usual and tried to harvest blooms that were a little out of reach. He had a fall and broke some bones. He’s on the mend and doing very well, but his accident has meant that July has come and almost gone without me noticing at all. It has meant no camping, no one day road trips, no escape from the city. It has also been brutally hot, so we’ve spent a lot of time doing not much at all, at home, trying to stay cool (the staying cool part has had poor results). It has also meant no photography.

Luckily, we had gone on a camping trip for a few days in late June before the accident, and equally luckily, we had spent three weeks in France, in Brittany, in late May and early June.

I took my Canon AE1 Program with me to Brittany, with a roll of Portra 800, a roll of Portra 400, and a roll of Kodak Gold 200. It isn’t easy to find film where we were and when I ran out, I bought a roll of Harman Phoenix 200. I will forever regret not picking the Kodak Gold that day instead, I’m not sure if the settings on my camera were wrong, but the whole roll came back horrible and I hate every single shot from it.

Here are a few of the memories I froze on film. With apologies to Brittany for the moments when I cursed the clouds, the rain and the cool temperatures. I wish I could have them now instead of the 40°C with humidex that have, yet again, descended on Toronto this week.

How has your summer been so far?

Valérie