This is a church, which jars out of the ground in the center of the web of windswept streets of Ballater, Scotland. I ventured out on my own from under my guiding cousin’s wing, Chris Duguid (very generous and affable person), son of Lorraine (who literally grows her own curtains out of vines and flowers, a wonderfully stout woman), next in line of my aunts after my father, and got this shot from across the street underneath a skeletal tree.

Combined with the tree in the lower left of the shot, the sickly finger-like limbs of the hibernating tree and the huge looming silhouette of the church evoke an imposing scale if not for the benevolent aura of the sky and the light falling on the back of the church. The way I prefer to picture it is as a wanderer, stumbling from the underbrush into a grove wherein salvation has been set down just when and where it was needed and the grand affair in the sky is a sign from the giver.

Ballater is a quiet town encased in steep ridges and high, sloping hills. It is kept clean and proper as the Queen of England will have to make her way through the town on her way to her country estate in Scotland. The river that flows alongside it, the River Dee, is the cleanest river in the country.