Local news. I took this picture and thought it didn’t matter. Just a scale. Minimalist? Minimalizing? I understand pictures by the stories I want to tell about them or through them, the way they expand for me into words. What story could I tell about this scale? It’s at the back of a store in the town I live in, and I took this picture while I was buying Play-Doh for my daughter. I took this picture of the scale I’ve passed many times because this time it looked blue and yellow and bright. I took it because the scale is filled with numbers and seems to be opening its arms to share, and because in the bar at its base I recognize myself, sometimes a measurer. I took it because I like crowded pictures, details excerpted from something larger, because of the yellow disk peeking out from behind the scale, because of 3M and Ace, and DeWalt in the corner. I’m in it, too, and if I pushed the contrast harder you might see me—those are my red shoulders, my hands gathered in the center, holding my phone, my face hidden behind the phone’s faint reflection. My daughter’s there, too, though she’s not tall enough to make it into the frame. Also, she’s standing behind me. But she’s there, pushing a kid-sized shopping cart containing Play-Doh, from which later she’ll shape a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch. She’ll use a knife to etch in the pumpkin’s ribs, and she’ll say, “Did you know the more lines there are, the more seeds are inside?”

“Really?” I’ll ask.

“Yes,” she’ll say, holding up a little clay pumpkin, “thousands.”