vandalism

This was a tulip.   Yesterday, this was a happy, flowering tulip.   This morning, it was devastated, a wrecked set of petals, its stem wrenched from the bulb.   So who was responsible? Most probably the squirrels, who are very cute and furry, to be sure, but who are a blight, a serious blight, on our gardening ambitions.   Maybe it was a rather dear possum that I saw shuffling around late last night?   Maybe it was the big brown rabbit that I encountered down the street a few weeks back?   Whatever, the detritus fits today's class's theme of photographs of the ordinary, of waste products, of matter: photographs that emphasize the unarguable material existence of the world, and, in the face of being photographed, the democracy of all matter: a brick pathway, and some quickly fading and curling red petals have the same claim on our attention as anything else.