my camera and I looking for the unusual, like a faded red rocking horse under a stable’s marquee, or an abandoned house falling to the east as the roof beams rot to powder, or the contradictions of brick mansions between the broken concrete of silos marking family farms, barely-two lane macadam roads with odd names like Steger, Andres, Pauling, and Burns, meaning nothing unless you know the land’s history, who built the railroads and tended the fields that made a Crete-Monee road out of wagon paths joining towns that fed the cities, all that is mysterious and nearly forgotten in the countryside’s genes, just as we will be when our great-grandchildren are old.