June 12 Photo: From a Low Angle

I’ve always been tall. Well, relatively speaking, anyway. I was a long baby, I got an early growth spurt in elementary school so I towered over most of my classmates, and I’ve just generally always been on the leading edge of the bell curve, height-wise. So it’s been a very long time since I’ve looked at things from a low angle on a regular basis.

But now that I have small children, I do find myself spending a significant amount of time lying on the floor, looking at things from their perspective. I’m not usually paying much attention to anything but them, though, so for today’s photo assignment, I took some time to walk around the house and the yard and look at things “from a low angle;” as if from my kids’ perspective.

Things look very different when you’re looking up at them from down below. The underpinnings of a table are very different from the simple flat surface on top. You notice light fixtures overhead that taller people never look up at. You’re more likely to watch clouds, or airplanes passing by, or birds on the wing.

And sometimes, you just see things at different angles and against different backdrops. I laid on the ground next to my garden (which is in a slightly raised bed, for an even better low angle) and saw my lilies in a way I’d never seen them before. Instead of seeing their bright blossoms amidst a sea of dark green leaves, I saw them against the pale blue-gray of a cloudy sky. Instead of seeing the fence behind the blooms at boring, predictable right angles, I saw it at an interesting cockeyed orientation. Instead of noticing how their stalks are anchored to the ground, I saw their blossoms reaching up towards the open sky. It gave me a whole new view of things I’d looked at hundreds or even thousands of times before.

So if you happen to be passing by and notice me lying on the ground, don’t worry. I’m okay. I’m just getting a new perspective on the world.