Three Hooks, One Coat, One Question

March seventh. The camera has been in the bag for four months, carried on walks, to the maker's market, through the whole back half of last year, and I have not used it once. Not avoidance exactly. More like I kept waiting for a subject that deserved it, and nothing quite qualified, and the bag got heavier and I got quieter about why.

This morning I took it out. The subject was the coat hooks. Three of them, mounted near the door, one holding the winter coat I have been wearing since November and two bare metal curves that have held nothing since my rain jacket went to the back of the closet. I am not sure what made me stop in front of them. Something about the empty hook on the end, the way it was just there, not waiting, not absent, just a hook, and before I'd thought it through the camera was in my hand and I was looking through the viewfinder at three hooks and one coat.

The empty hook was the one I was actually looking at.

I took four frames. The first three were technically fine and the fourth was the one, the way it almost always works, something settles after the third attempt and you stop performing the photograph and just take it. The empty hook read differently in the viewfinder than it did with my bare eyes. Smaller and more deliberate. The kind of ordinary that earns a second look when you stop moving past it.

Looking through the viewfinder at three hooks and one coat.

The post I have been half-writing in my head for four months was about why I hadn't used the camera. But it turns out the naming wasn't going to be the turn. The turn was just, picking it up. Pointing it at something so unremarkable I almost talked myself out of it. The coat hooks on the wall in the morning light, one occupied, two empty, and whatever it means that I finally stopped in front of them.