A picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words

My folks' power is out right now (and may be through Easter), so they don't have internet or anything. (Or water - they're on a well, and no power means no well pump.) Mom called yesterday to tell me about a barn that they lost from the bad storms; I thought it was much worse than this:




The barn is about 150 years old; it was just used for hay and straw storage now, since they're getting out of the hog business. All the sows used to be kept in the pens along the east side of the building. Depending how bad the damage to the beams is, they may fix it.

Normally Mom probably would have emailed us all a picture, but without power she just called. In this case my brother sent it from his phone (he & his wife happened to be visiting). A mixture of pictures and words gets the actual state of being across much more clearly than just the phone call did.

It made me think: if you're advertising an event, on paper or on your website, or doing follow-up in a newsletter about an event, pictures can say so much for you that might not come across clearly just in the text. Or, if you have damage from natural disasters, pictures could either reassure patrons that the damage maybe isn't as bad as the news outlets made it sound, or reinforce that the library needs some help to get back to functioning as normal.

Not a new or profound concept, but "lost a barn" doesn't sound so bad now that I've seen the picture.