Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011
One of the things I greatly wish more people did on a day to day basis is pay attention to the world around them. I see people get lost, lose things, miss far more than you’d ever expect just because they were caught up in their own doings and stopped looking around. I do it occasionally, I’m sure, but I do have a much stronger tendency to just poke around and notice things thanks to my twin loves of geography and art (the geography makes me pay attention to the world around me, the art makes me analyze it enough to notice things.) You probably don’t pay attention as much as you think.
I mean, when was the last time you looked at the ceiling in a store?
They’re fascinating, really. The architects know most people don’t bother looking up, as it’s not really part of the task at hand, so they don’t bother decorating them, or even covering up the utilitarian aspects. A few stores do cover the pipes and cameras and I-beams and lights and all the fun stuff, but most don’t. Seriously, just look up occasionally.
Admittedly, I am biased. I love seeing the nitty-gritty inside story of something. Like bones. Bones are fascinatingly complex. They’re both so similar and so different from the creature that once bore them, and putting together the puzzle is an occupation in itself. Paleontology, specifically. That’s a lot of what they do, after all, putting together bones seeking the story hidden within.
Even with more modern bones, they can bear mysteries in them. I have little idea what creature this bone was from, or why it ended up in the path to the snow-covered beach I was walking on. It’s a large vertebrae, so it probably used to be a deer or the like. There’s plenty in the area. But there were only a few vertebrae around, and no other bones in sight. The snow was light, so none were hidden in that, and the sand underneath was solid in the cold. And it was near the start of winter, just after the new year started, long before winter wears down the herds and prunes out the weak. Plus these few bones were on the older side, certainly not freshly white. Most likely a predator found them and carried them around to where I found them, but then, why would they carry multiple vertebrae to the same spot and not anything more?
And I would have missed them entirely if I wasn’t watching the ground at my feet, paying attention to where I was going. I’m not sure anyone else I was with even noticed them, despite them being right in the path. It’s not what they were there for, after all.
