That picture.

December 19, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

That picture.
The bravery of that AP photographer. The poise.
The white walls, the black suit, the art on the walls, pictures.
That picture.
I wonder if I would show such bravery and poise in such circumstances. I hope I never find out.
Today was a snow day for us, crowning a weekend of winter wonderland and sweet things to come. We were running errands. I was getting my hair colored. Standing there while the kids were getting their hair cut while I waited for the color to take, chatting with Ellie, the hairdresser from Nicaragua whom I’ve grown to love over my monthly vanity rendezvous, chatting about family and the cost of health insurance and how to make churros over the cup of coffee she always offers while we wait, but today she was cutting the kids’ hair and I checked my phone for news and there was the news, and that picture. The picture was going viral on social media, on its way to a Pulitzer, someone among all the photojournalists reacting on a friend’s social media page said. That picture, a punch in the gut.
Eight shots, shouting “Don’t forget Aleppo!, Don’t forget Syria!” The young man, so sharply dressed, shouting and threatening the crowd after shooting the Russian ambassador to Turkey, black against the white background, it all goes so fast and there is that picture, a photographer was there and what he did is incredible. The picture so crisp in such a tense situation, and the contrast, the clash of black and white, the face of rage against the outstretched body of the ambassador, the suit flowing, the finger raised, nothing else and everything is there.
The elegant and sober setting and this young man, his rage, but he is so composed, look at his trigger finger, somebody else on that photojournalists’ thread on social media said, he has his finger outstretched and not actually on the trigger, while throwing the Tawhid hand sign, the universal raised index finger sign that ISIS has adopted and twisted, the Tawhid the belief in the oneness of god, but for ISIS a sinister signifier of extremist rejection of any and all other views.
That picture won’t let me sleep. What bravery in that photographer and what an image.
In its perfection it reminds me of James Nachtwey’s images of the Somalia famine and how their beauty raised a storm of ethical questions among us photojournalists but ultimately prevailed: in our job as visual communicators, the reality of the horrors we may be called to cover and convey demands no less than that quality, and far from glorifying horrors and making us insensitive to them, powerful and beautiful images are the best tools we have to bear witness.
That picture is already an icon.
Here in my world I had taken a picture of an angel.

Just starting.

December 7, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

In a moment of rare quiet solitude this morning I was reading a New Yorker profile of Pedro Almódovar and when I got to the part where he talks about losses, and how he feels them differently now that he’s older, it made me reflect on the milestone I just passed, turning fifty. After a week of sheer joy with friends, basking in their love and partying as if I were twenty, it is time to start reflecting: those symbols, milestones, rituals, these heightened steps on the chaotic and haphazard and uncontrollable path of our lives. Turning thirty was a momentous time; I had made it a symbol and a hope, the day when I would start freeing myself from what was tying me down.
When I turned thirty I stopped feeling sorry for myself and my handicap (I turned deaf around my mid-twenties from a pool of bad genes) and decided to rescue an abysmal self-image (becoming a photographer better to hide) and I started opening my eyes. When I turned thirty I started rediscovering the world of sound and talk, and the social world I had been slowly leaving, digging my own hole out of fear and shame; I started consulting surgeons to find out if a minor birth defect that had come to define my life could be addressed (it could not, and so it is, and it stopped defining my life); I started taking charge, and even if I skipped and fell often as I ran, I went on running with eyes wide open and as I turn fifty I’m just finally learning to fly.
The wild rosebush in the driveway is still blooming in subfreezing temperatures, calling to me as I look out the kitchen window.
Eyes wide open I'm learning to fly and  taking nothing for granted. The leaves crunch under my feet in the morning and are ringed by frost, shades of brown and white. The fog is lifting, and as I start to fly I want to take others by the hand, better to feel the air in my lungs. I am flying free and growing strong, and I am teaching my sons to do the same, take others by the hand as they soar - no time, no time to wait fifty years. It is grey and cold today, winter is settling, and we’re learning to fly together in the little bungalow, drab outside with all the colors inside.
There’s no stopping us, the sky is clear above the winter clouds and the image is coming into focus, and we’ll be flying high because these times demand it and the losses feel acute when you’re older but they’ve always been, dead by overdose at the age of nineteen he was, when last night he was playing the piano with me - wide-eyed thirteen-year-old.
It is not just about turning fifty and hoping for fifty-five more, seeing it all clearer and sharper now, it is about coming into focus, assessing the essential, art and ideas and actions hand in heart in hand.
I’m just starting.

Almost fifty.

November 26, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

I’m almost fifty.
It doesn’t matter much to anybody but me. I’ll still get up in the morning and make lunch boxes, feed the cats and the hens and wake up the kids, plan meals and go buy groceries and cook, go around on my bike, give tutoring lessons to support myself until I can do that through photography.
One day, when I’m fifty-one.
(I couldn’t write these past weeks. The election just floored me, then spurred me to action, with a passion and urgency that has left no time left for writing.)

Baroque.

October 27, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

It’s Halloween. It’s almost Halloween, three days left, the kids made costumes from scratch, and I did nothing. From paper bags and cereal boxes, recycled plastic and paper, and much thought, and what sounded like endless debate between themselves, and urgency, because they are at that age still, not just quite over that age where it truly matters.
This is what the week looks like. I take a picture of their costumes in the baroque mess of my house.That and a friend from a buried past visiting in a whiff, a photographer friend, a Mom of two boys, accomplished and questioning, working on, work that matters, meaningful and beautiful work.
That the thought of the future opening, light with possibilities, just like that, and the engrossing sight and smell of fall, sweet and acrid, the relief.

Looking through the lens.

October 24, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

It is an evening like a rainbow.
The girls are playing in the neighbor’s yard, all these girls, friends, the ones from the neighbor in the back and the ones next door, so I tell the boys and they come out running, running to Addie’s blond ponytails and Soveryn’s brown pigtails, and her big sister Klaye’s caramel skin is glowing in the fading light against her blue shirt, the bright yellow pompoms from this weekend’s Homecoming parade that Lidia swerves around stand out against the grass, and Dylan rushes back in to our house saying I’ve got to get ready for battle and when he rushes back out I can’t see his face, he’s all ninja. The grass is turning brown in patches but it is still fair outside.
I have the urge to take pictures of all this exuberance, of the mundane joy of living right here now, in the soft dusk of a fall Monday, the myriad colors of their faces, and there is the fulfillment of using the new camera, a newer refurbished camera I marvel at like a kid, and we’re all out there, Jason, my neighbor, and I and all these kids, and he says I just enjoy watching the show.
Dinner will be yesterday’s pasta and a green smoothie, eat your vegetables, be happy, there’s the new camera and all the colors of our lives.
I see my life better through a camera. It makes everything taste better to my heart’s eyes.

Celebrations.

October 20, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

I celebrate the little things, and rejoice in them. This is what I wanted to write about tonight.
The struggles feel real, they sting and they may hurt but they are necessary and ephemeral, just like the laughter, the wild laughter of Nicolas.
Nicolas struggles with low self-esteem and told me last night in a fit of crying that he thinks nobody loves him. It breaks my heart. This is what I wanted to write about tonight.
I celebrate the little things and the struggles not because I have to but because they are my tapestry. After I talked to him for seemed like forever and he went to sleep a little calmer, Nicolas woke up smiling and the day went on breathing lighter.
The day was full of work and meetings, the boys were at cross-country practice and it had turned cold, and I drove over even though it was not my carpooling day to bring them their water bottles, for they had forgotten them this morning. The night was coming fast as they ran back toward us, a coach and some parents, and their silhouettes were vague. They felt cold but they were warm from running. Nobody lingered. Afterward we drove home and they sang in the car, and we ate the dinner I had made yesterday, rice and bean soup and a cookie pie I made also because the oven was already warm from baking the bread.
This is it.
Earlier there was the light on the fading grape leaves on the porch, resplendent in the moment, asking me to give thanks, and rest in that.
It is all in that moment.

Friends.

September 30, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

Last week end was endless.
Old friends came to visit on Saturday, and ended up staying the whole day, and the day seemed to stretch and fill and grow, taking up all those years of absence in, and as the week started it felt as if it had been much more than just a day, every moment lived fully in it, as they stayed on and the hours went by and we talked endlessly around the kitchen table, after they emergency-babysat the boys while I went to a photo shoot in the morning and came back two hours late, here they were, early in the morning last Saturday, twenty-two years later, knocking on the door, looking sounding laughing the same, and we picked up the conversation where we must have left it, all those years ago, between here and Palestine, or is it Paris.
Good friends are like magic: they do away with time.
Twenty-two years and it’s like yesterday.
Dick was a graduate student in the Photojournalism program at Mizzou, like me. He is now a managing editor at an established magazine. He and Kathy introduced me to their daughter. She goes to Mizzou, too, and to the Journalism sequence there, closing the loop of our lives in a wink.
We used to get together, a group of grad students and then some, for Sunday brunches that lasted forever and involved reading poetry and talking about art, when we were not eating or cooking or fervently discussing photography, or world affairs. What I do remember most is a feeling, and the sound of the laughter we shared, and that there was always coffee.
This was twenty-two years ago. Last Saturday we had lots of coffee, and French cheese, and we sat around the kitchen table for hours on end.
They had to go back the next day but it doesn’t matter, they’re here.
Good friends are like magic.

Summer is gone.

August 23, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

I have missed writing.
I’ve missed the act of writing and I’ve missed on the writing, and the summer is gone and with it the easy slacking off of things of no particular interest, like routine and admonitions and rules in the sand. It is a hard discipline, that slackening, in the end, because it means letting go of that constant and oh so illusory need for control, such a common illusion and such a destructive one. In summer things tend to escape my control, and that may be the most useful thing I can teach the kids.
Photography is about control too, come to think of it. Don’t we say that we “capture” a moment, a face, a feeling, a scene? It is the same as controlling it, really: to make reality ours, to carve it into something we can control, display, share as our creation. But what’s there to capture? It is there, no matter what, and a photograph is as unreal as a drawing in the sand. It is as unreal as the big top rising out of a nondescript field and evaporating into the night in the same day, that spectacle I used to never stop marveling at, seeing the tent being raised each and every morning, when we were a circus family, and coming down at night to leave only images, memories, a feeling, love.
Oh how I miss it.
The ephemerality the spontaneity the lightness of being, every morning, and every night, over and over repeated, and I thought I learned to live fully and let go of the illusions of securing that moment, and I don’t think I learned at all.
Summer is gone, all right.

The rain.

June 20, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

The rains came in sheets and it smelled so good.
This was the most joyful event in my life, he said.
Let’s go out in the rain, he said. The rains came and we walked out into them and he danced and danced, and jumped and ran, he laughed and he danced and he stuck out his tongue and he said, come with me Mom, come with me and we danced round and round, he took my hand and I got dizzy but he kept going, we celebrated the rain and danced and laughed, and later I took shelter under the porch but Nicolas he kept dancing and hopping, he licked the rain on his hands and he kept dancing, like a kid, now I know where the name comes from.
The rain smells so good, he said. Yes, I said, that’s the best part about the rain in the summer, how it smells so good.
It hasn’t rained in almost a month and the rain smelled so good and felt even better, and now it’s cool, the shortest night of the year has begun and I opened all the windows and asked the cool to stay.
Nicolas is at an art camp, exploring Kandinsky and jazz and beatboxes and how to be in the moment. The other day he brought back a small square aquarelle and pencil painting that is so beautiful, where does it come from?
And the rain came, and he danced, Mom I want to dance and it feels so good, it is the most joyful event in my life.
I couldn’t take a picture because the rain was coming down so hard it painted sheets around him, and it was so achingly perfect in joy.
You didn’t want to miss any of it.
It was the summer solstice and Nicolas danced in the crashing rain, and licked his hands, and made it the longest most joyful day.

Annie.

June 11, Columbia (Missouri.)

I woke up to the sounds of her silence and I miss her terribly.
For months now I have been looking for someone who would be to Annie what I cannot be, give her the time and attention she deserves, love her as she deserves, and now I have and the old saying is assaulting me, yes you don’t know how much you love until you’ve lost.
And I’m not talking about my husband.
It’s a beautiful morning, quiet, the house is empty, I am alone in it, the light is beginning to flood through the east windows, it’s warm already, I sit with a book in the front yard among the apple trees and the redbud trees and the birch and it is quiet and she is not here. I have a toothache, I try not to think about it, I drink the morning coffee, more ritual than taste. In a moment it will be too hot to sit outside, a good day to have a water gun fight, like the one the boys had last night with their friends who came over from across the street and the house behind our house, and I said water the seedlings while you’re at it and they didn’t listen, I hung the towels and the shirts out to dry out on the porch, it had been a hot day and I drenched my self with the garden hose after my bike ride from work in the afternoon. Then I took Annie for a walk.
She’s not here and I miss her.

It is.

June 10, Columbia (Missouri.)

Sometimes I just want to scream like a blade.
It comes unannounced like a tide and it is gone just as easy.
The ire the resentment, the tears, they feel sweet, all the bad useless demons and the silence (never the silence) laughing because I am alone and maybe the intensity of what I take from photography won’t be enough, the kids, skipping stones gone, it doesn’t last long, I know I am strong and beauty is too overwhelming, it is there and it is what it is, and so it is with losing what I thought was love.

Dreams of ice cubes.

June 6, Columbia (Missouri.)

It’s turned warm. I feel like sitting down on the porch with a cold glass of sparkling water and jingling the ice cubes in it until they melt. I also have to make dinner.
That, and a million other things, or so it seems, and I’m running late.
It’s almost five o’clock on a warm Monday evening, I just picked up the kids on their first day of summer school and we took Annie to the vet, and I haven’t even thought about thinking what’s for dinner, and there are more errands to run, I need to go by the bank, the plants need watering, the dog needs walking and later on there is the gym class for Nicolas to drive to on the other side of town, and there is not going to be any ice cubes tingling on the porch, but rather a mad race to mark the next chore off on my perpetual to-do list.
I’m always running, it’s a condition in my life, like dandruff, or fair skin. I’m a single mother, I'm a photographer, I’m perpetually running to try and not be late. But in all honesty I’ve had that feeling of having to catch up, of having to run in place in order not to fall behind, as far as I can remember. Being a mother has only made it real.
Last Friday at about the same time as it is now I made a wildly optimistic prediction, talking to a friend on the phone, that upon hanging up I was going to mow the yard front and back then reorganize the cabinet in the kitchen and then go to work on my photography business’ marketing plan. Now that the kids have grown they need to be able to reach and get cups and plates out by themselves and up until now they've had to climb up on the counters and balance on a slippery surface in order to do that, so I was going to reorganize the cabinets and of course when you move things around in the house after they’ve been there for three years it is highly likely you’re going to have to scrub everything clean too, and so here I was, wildly assuming that I could go ahead and mow the yard (an exercise akin to fine needlepoint as there are about two dozen trees of various sizes ranging from seedling to three-year-old fruit trees on the property that need to be carefully maneuvered around,) reorganize and clean those cabinets and then still have the time, not to mention the energy, to sit down and look at photographs.
Last night after dinner I did reorganize those cabinets.
The ice cubes are still a dream.

Like a kid (yet again.)

May 30, Columbia (Missouri.)

My head is exploding.
Yesterday I got fitted with a new pair of hearing aids, and it feels just like when I first got hearing aids twenty years ago: a world of sounds is assaulting me with its vigor, a lost world revealed.
What a world!
Simple things, just water flowing, keys jangling, a plastic bag being ruffled, sounds are exploding in my ears, crisp, sharp as nails, and this morning I walk through the house in amazement over the incredible power of the hardwood floors squeaking or the birds chirping outside my windows.
The joy! I am like a newborn discovering the world, in awe and wonder, thanks to failing ten-year-old hearing aids I finally decided to replace.
We threw a sleepover party last night to celebrate the end of the school year, eight boys telling jokes over pizza and then wandering through the house wielding light sabers while eating cup cakes, and four of them are still sleeping in my boys’ bedroom and there I am, of all days, making all that noise today, all that noise but wait, it’s always been there, hidden in the depths of my damaged ears and aging hearing aids, and this explosion of sound sensations is only my renaissance (yet again.)
Just a few days ago I was reading about the world of touch in The New Yorker and I was blown away by the breadth of this world I had never envisioned quite in this way (the power of great reporting and writing,) and reflecting on what our senses mean for each of us individually.
What has losing my ability to hear meant for me over all these years, other than the denial then the reckoning, the world of sound so fresh and new twenty years ago as I first got fitted, and again today? What has it meant other than the wonder of that, this feeling of sounds revealed so strong so full so powerful, such a gift?
I realize that my disability is a gift on days like today, but that it may also be one of the key factors in my ability to photograph in the way that I do, the way some blind people can develop a heightened sound perception. Key to my way through the world, it defines me then in many more ways than a limit and a label.
I may never know, but I am intrigued.
That, and jubilant like a kid.

Eternity and a fire.

May 17, Columbia (Missouri.)

It has been a long time without writing. Single motherhood life so busy, the little ailments of our lives, the friendships and the work done.
But on Sunday the kids and I cleared bushes in the backyard to start making a tree house and made a fire. Or I cleared the bramble and they bickered, and the new neighbors’ girls came over and the other neighbor girl too, and Dylan became a typical ten-year-old trying to impress the girls and Nicolas hovered around wanting to be included and sometimes succeeding. Another task, to make a bow and arrow, and they looked for suitable pieces of wood amid the downed bushes, and feathers (no feathers) and flint stones (no flint stones) and we ended up with a lot of sticks.
This is what cutting electronic devices for the kids on week ends turned out to be, busy. The weather was cool and it was sunny and the yard looked beautiful with the gazebo I improvised for the wisteria and the new cherry trees among the five oak seedlings Dylan brought back from school on Arbor Day because some kids didn’t want them and he had to save them. Ibtisam arrived and we lit the fire and dragged a wooden table outside and ate around the fire while the kids soon wandered away back to the neighbor girls.
Ibtisam is a writer and around the fire we talked about creativity, what it is and how one can or cannot live on it but has to because we agreed it is not a choice but a way of being in the world. We talked about writing and about photography. We talked about how the writing tends to wander away from you, how it carries you along and you end up in an entirely different place from where you started because the words have a life of their own.  The act of writing a form of therapy for me, when photography is simply something I have to do because it calls me, it is there to be taken and I simply the vessel, the eye directing the arm directing the fingers directing the camera to take that picture because it is simply calling to be taken, cutting through the bramble of reality to get to the picture I know is there (sometimes not) and needs to be taken, an urge and a necessity stronger than iron, much stronger than my will, much stronger than my emotions.
When I had a job as a newspaper photographer I remember being in awe of the power of photography to take me out of myself; suffering from a migraine I would go into an assignment knowing that the minute I stepped into the work and started taking pictures the physical pain would be gone, and I wouldn’t realize it until I stepped out again and it came back just as instantly as it had vanished, I like a Buddhist monk who has trained for years to control her mind and can ignore the pain by sheer will, only none of it my conscious making.
Photography is so much more than my voice then. It is much more than the stubborn inner wall I am uselessly building against death and time passing, the joy of emotions translated. It is what connects me to the mystery of what I can’t name, my connection to eternity.

New York!

April 3, 2016, Elmwood Park (New Jersey.)

Spring Break and I took the kids to New York.
The excuse was to take Dylan to the Metropolitan Opera after he surprised my by loving every minute of the performance at the Missouri Theater last month, but who needs an excuse?
Central Park in early bloom and almost winter light, the magic, the hustle of tourist hell Times Square where my friend and host Kristine works, the views from the Empire State Building, the Staten Island ferry ride, the musicians on the subway platforms, the illegal performers in the subway cars, pretzels with mustard and too much salt on the way to the Met, sitting in the Metropolitan Opera house, smelling the smells of New York and going back in time, watching the boys in all their wonder, and their kindness (walking by a guy asking for “money for food,” they said we should help him so we turned around and stood in line and in the rush to get him a sandwich and a hot drink.)
Life is beautiful hardly sums it up. I try to grab a memory or two with my phone, I want more than anything to be in this moment and be elated and grateful.

Does it matter?

March 21, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

Last week I had a routine outpatient procedure at the hospital and it made me think of death. Of course.
What if I didn’t wake up? Things happen after all. And things did not happen, of course, and I woke up fine and was up and going and wondering what to do with the rest of the day, which I had set aside in case, well, something happened, or I felt the way I was told I would feel, woozy, tired, which I didn’t, and I couldn’t even make myself feel productive and clean the car because I had done that the day before, waiting for the effects of the medicine to take hold, nor could I reschedule my tutoring appointments, too late, so I just paid bills and straightened paperwork and cooked, because another effect of the procedure is that I had not eaten since two days before.
Death was out, spaghetti was in.
And so that’s my life.
Frantic and somewhat predictable: and not even a photograph, in those last two weeks, although I have been, as I always am, looking at a lot of photographs, and constantly thinking about them, and why we are taking them and what they mean and what it means and if it matters in the end. Are all photographs  good, no matter, all the million pictures people take, with their cell phones, the million selfies, are they good pictures just because they exist, as someone on social media old me, rebelling against applying any “hierarchy” on art? Does it matter? Why?

A piece of myself is gone.

February 28, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

A woman I loved died this morning in my hometown, in the South of France.
Fanette was one of my closest friends' mother. We grew up together, Zaza, her sister and I, our parents close friends, our childhoods a common territory, Fanette a constant presence.
The afternoons spent in the cavernous stone house deep in our old medieval village, two little girls playing in the stone shed full of magic off the patio, later watching dubbed American TV series in the cluttered room under the roof where Fanette sometimes accompanied us, later still, adolescents, listening to punk rock on the radio in Zaza’s room, her sister Sophie not quite as close but still. Fanette, towering in the art supplies store she owned a few blocks from their home, the smell of paint and pastels, her tall, bony, straight figure commanding and slightly frightening.
It is as if I had grown up in that family as much as in my own’s, Fanette’s taste for traditional French cooking the kind my mother never cooked, her brisk manner, the reassurance of her total authority, Fanette and Jacques, always uttered in that order by my mother and father, their friends Fanette et Jacques, these words mapping my childhood as much as the rooms of my home and roads of my village, the old dark stone village house full of paintings, sculptures and artifacts that secretly scared me, the family were avid collectors and art lovers, the cavernous house and its smells, the smell of polished wood, of stone, of the magical territory of my child mind, that house the realm of my childhood, Fanette, its implacable captain.
She died this morning, at home, surrounded by her family, peacefully my mother told me.
My friend lost her mother, and I a piece of myself too.

Silent partner.

February 14, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

Nicolas has been struggling with attention at school all this week, and with frustration at home, the old sibling rivalries, frustration and anger turned into screeching cries, triggered by nothing. 
For me this means a lot of thinking and agonizing about how to teach my kids the emotional and social skills they need to develop into emotionally and socially stable, fulfilled and happy adults, it means a lot of thinking back into my own childhood and how my own insecurities developed, and stayed, and whether I can successfully teach those so important skills to my kids when I’m so unsure about mastering them myself. It means a lot of time spent parenting, and less for photography.
Being a single mother means the responsibility for all this, and everything else, rests on me, and just me. Sometimes the pressure feels just overwhelming. But there is the grace, the daily drop of happiness, and gratitude, the grace and the rain and looking up at the grey skies, swirling in the cries.
Grace: my children. They were planned; they have been my priority since I brought them into this world; they come first.
This means sometimes, most of the time, my days are filled with them, and work, and photography goes under the surface, although it is always there, like a friend walking by my side, my silent partner.

January breeze.

February 7, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

We camped out in the total rehab of a house on an air mattress that made my back screech, amidst the rubble and the dirt, with the tall windows open because it smelled of paint, and there was happiness.
The weather warm enough for spring, I opened the windows to let the breeze in, late January and it’s like sneaking out of winter for a night, and breathed in happiness, all together again, so uncomfortable and so perfectly joyful, silly, and in the morning, when I was scrubbing on, there was a work of art: right there the windows in the kids room, neatly covered in newspaper because of painting the walls, and the light through the print, an ephemeral work of art, beauty.
What makes a life worth living?
Streams of simple happiness in the unexpected, two boys, raising them to be caring, and love, or maybe just the light through the window, and the caress of an impossible January breeze.

All that matters.

January 16, 2016, Columbia, (Missouri.)

A week of working on a photography project is a good week.
The sheer enchantment of it, for it has been so long, and it is rejuvenating to be simply working, but also to be working on something that is relevant to the day’s discourse and important to tell, something you feel strongly about. It is what we’re here for, after all, all of us, photographers, mothers, writers, laborers, artists, brothers, teachers, activists, all of us toiling at the day’s work, all of us and it is all that matters, in our last hour, the helping, inspiring, making this shared world a little kinder, a little fairer, or just a little more beautiful.
A week of the usual daily chores, a good week at school for the boys, praise and pride, an uneventful week at work, but for seeing small kids’ minds struggling and growing, fascinating, and the work from my heart and soul, not much to report but a sense of accomplishment I am ever grateful to have thanks to the art of photography.
That is all for this week, and it is a lot.

Endless laughter.

January 9, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

I survived the holidays and all the new year’s wishes of joy and love, especially love.
I’m ready to move on, I’ve packed away the nostalgia, accepted the fact that nothing supported it but emptiness and longing.
The road opened up again, I’ll see where it goes, it is mine alone.
The holidays, Texas and my sister-in-law, my only sister, and an emotional landscape I know too well, a landscape where I get lost and can’t find myself, but also a landscape of family, or the closest to family I can claim on this side of the Atlantic, and which is about to become a loaded field of memories and discarded opportunities, and in the end just nothing.
My sister-in-law lives in a small town east of Dallas and has built a life there, started a family, a business. I could fit in and would probably be able to grow my photo business a lot faster thanks to her connections to the Latino community and beyond. I never will because the last thing I want now is to get closer to what used to be. The road here ended.
I’ll stay away and I’ll dream of much farther away,  there is always New York and going back in time there, I was young in New York in the eighties, the grit and the possibilities, but I’ll stay in the Midwest and I’ll keep on taking life a step at a time, I’ll move to St Louis come spring so the kids can enroll in a public charter French immersion school there and I’ll hope for the best, I’ll laugh my head off, I’ll call my friends, I’ll try to earn some money doing what I love, taking pictures, speaking in images, and maybe St Louis will see the business finally take off, and that would be my oh I wish for this year, after healthy happy kids, gratitude in every breath and endless laughter.