Two photos from my week. I had to pick up some prescriptions one day and parked in the two-story structure next to the clinic. As I was driving out again along the back wall, I noticed the sun shining down into the alcove, illuminating the stairs that lead down from the top tier. It wasn’t busy (I was the only person in the garage at the moment), so I stopped at the far end right in front of the stairs to take a picture before turning and heading out of the structure.

Here is the more “arty” photo, with a cool mix of diagonal lines and movement from light to shadow.

And here is a just plain photo, which isn’t particularly artful. You can see all the “warts” on display, like the plate covering a pipe on the garage floor and the pile of dead leaves that probably collected recently over several windy days.

But I also liked how the bright yellow diagonal lines sort of met up with the diagonal lines of the lower and upper staircase flights.

In an ideal world, everything here would have been freshly swept and scrubbed, with freshly laid black asphalt and newly painted lines just waiting for me to come by and take a picture.

In the real world, however, we have to take what we can get. Which usually includes the warts.

And that’s okay, right? Because we can imagine the “ideal” only once we have the “real” to show us the way.