I'm the cook at a cafe inside a bookstore downtown Xenia, Ohio. It's been near a year and half since we opened, making scratch made soups, salads, sandwiches, and larger plates - specials of the day - comfort food mostly, and desserts too. Behind the cafe is a not very attractive block size city parking lot, rimmed by the back of store fronts on the north and east sides and by a few private residences to the west. Every couple of days or so, taking a break from the fluorescents of the kitchen, I wander out back to these built up asphalt badlands and make a photograph or two of what I encounter. Sometimes it's a wide view to capture changes in the weather or the turning of the seasons, and other times it's focusing on the features of the space - the color or texture of a wall or the way the shapes and lines come together in the viewfinder. Other days it's the things I find - something lost, something discarded, something forgotten - that ask to be seen. There's life back there too and I take pleasure in getting to know the plants as they thrive through the warmer months and settle in for the colder, and every now and then I'll meet another person and I'll ask if I can take their picture. At first it was a challenge - was it possible to make an image of some value from such paltry pickings - but soon enough I realized it's not unlike cooking well: observe the seasons and appreciate the changes, attend to the details and taste every step of the way, and use what's fresh - what's been given. And sometimes too, cooking is making something out of nothing, and making from that nothing something to be enjoyed.