A few days ago, on a beautiful blue sky, puffy white cloud afternoon, a photography friend and I went over to Fennville Michigan to see the poppy field. If you’re not from around here, and maybe even if you are, you might ask what poppy field?

There’s a special place in a tiny little town over on the west side of the state. It’s four acres of red poppies and blue bachelor buttons. Maybe that’s hard to image, so let me share a few of the images I took over the course of a couple magical hours.

We arrived around 5 p.m. and the light on the flowers was so beautiful. It was hard to capture the entire enormity of it.

As we stood, mesmerized, near the opening to the field I listened as more people arrived.

Each person stopped abruptly and then sighed or gasped. Voices lowered in respect and awe.

The awe is because the field is over the top beautiful. The respect came from the reason the field was planted in the first place. It was originally dedicated to a young man who served tours in Afghanistan, came home with PTSD, and took his own life.

The field is also dedicated to a young 19 year old woman who lost her battle to a rare form of cancer.

I looked up both stories after taking many photos of beautiful poppies up close and in masses. We were waiting for the sun to lower, hoping for a pretty sunset.

Meanwhile we wandered all the way around the field, looking for different angles, different colors.

Different shapes.

A lot of the time I wasn’t shooting. I was just walking and thinking about the young people this town lost, the heartbreak that planted these beautiful flowers.

I don’t know how many pictures of poppies I can cram into one blog post. I want you to see them all. But I took 309 images, and that’s a bit much. I think I edited 70 some, still too many.

I’ll just try to show you a representative few and hope that you can imagine the feeling.

By 9 p.m. or so the sun was lowering. The white puffy clouds were long gone but there were still interesting shapes in the sky. It wasn’t a big impressive sunset but when you looked through a camera lens it was pretty amazing.

I don’t think we could get a more perfect day to see this sweet field.

There’s a very narrow window to see the poppies. They begin to bloom around the middle of June and they’re done by the 4th of July. I feel very lucky that we got to see them at all.

And I hope you enjoyed seeing a tiny bit of a magical place. Think a bit about the two young people too, I think their families would appreciate knowing they are not lost in all the noise of today.

In a peaceful poppy field in a tiny town in rural Michigan their memories are strong. Even among those of us that never met them.