Red apple.

December 8, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)
It’s Christmas coming already. Somebody told me one day that life was like a roll of toilet paper: the closer you are to the end the faster it goes. Yesterday was summer and tomorrow is Christmas, France is a long way behind, and the circus, it closed then reopened, and the leaves are brittle now and we are together again but we were never apart.
The furnace rumbles in the basement, underneath the living room sofas. It rattles like an animal waking up, full of discontent. It has turned cold in this warm autumn. We put the tree in the front yard as I had dreamed. It is a tree made out of metal rods and plastic thread that you assemble from the bottom up, like a giant legged puzzle. Marcos found it on the curb at a house he worked on and picked it up and he gave it to us because he has no use for Christmas trees. The last and only other time we put it up it was in front of our motor home on the parking lot of the circus in Hugo, Oklahoma. We didn’t turn on the lights much because electricity was not on us. Here it is surrounded by the fruit trees I planted in a semi circle without wanting to when we moved to Columbia. The wind keeps toppling it down. It is beautiful, if a little smaller than I had imagined it would look in this perfect semi circle of life.
There is tiny red apple on one of the bare fruit trees, right next to the fake Christmas tree. It calls to the round shiny Christmas ornaments. If it’s still there after Christmas I will give it a name, for good measure.

Clamors.

July 3, 2017, Saint-Ismier (France.)

It is a summer of wide traveling, and I revel in my good fortune, and dwell in my silent wounds, that stubborn gift.
The landscape changes. The thoughts come and go, incessant, and the joy is there too. I am in the country I grew up in, France, visiting my aging mother, and I feel like a stranger, and the thoughts follow me, with the wild breath of the horizon on their tail.
The boys like the food here, and it is good, and we revel in it, and laugh. The bread, hard crust, the infinity of cheeses, raw milk at its best, the yoghurt aisles that stretch on and on, that sort of hard salami that you can only find here and that my mother sent me once in a package only to have it confiscated at customs and a stern note slipped in admonishing me that it is illegal to ship meat and I will be prosecuted (but I didn’t do anything! I protested silently, while also silently bemoaning the waste of such good food.)
I find the voices judging, they open old thoughts. It is all in my head.
The sights are wonders, majestic mountains here, the multifaceted beauty of Paris - but for its trail of memories, even the careful arrangement of macaroons in the window of a bakery. The art of eating for the sake of its pleasure has to please the eyes too. It is all an elegant feast.
I feel like a stranger, in my longing for the clamors of the New World plundered. My thoughts yank me there, the wounds whispering.

There.

April 20, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

There, laid bare.
They do that, now - sometimes.
I photograph them, if they’ll let me.
There, that’s it.

Hard velvet.

April 7, 2017, Mountain Home (Arkansas.)

Nothing beats the beauty of the southern Missouri hills in the late afternoon light of an early spring. The velvet of the view glistening on the palm of my eye.
But the beauty, it has strange fruits: in the hamlet of Hartville, the sign welcoming into town with an American flag and a Confederate flag, like sisters.
We made it back to the circus and life on the road for a few days, and back again, and I made it back into my candy store of photography. There is something about the circus that won’t let go of my imagination. It is nothing exotic; for us it was daily life for years and its routine still is. It may be the heart at the bottom of it, like a twin to mine.

It's crazy like that.

March 29, 2017, Hope (Arkansas.)

Photography is crazy like that.
The trees did not look like that. The light was interesting, but it came to life through the lens, or rather took a life of its own entirely, unfurling a view only my eye could envision.
Photography is crazy like that, and that’s why I’m in love with its song.

The sand castle.

March 28, 2017, Ashdown (Arkansas.)

We’re going to make a sand castle, he said.
I was walking to town when I saw them. An older man and a little girl, playing in a sandy area off the street in Ashdown, Arkansas, a small town off highway 67 in the southwestern corner of Arkansas, by Texarkana. I asked if I could take their picture and he said yes, this is my grand-daughter, she’s two, we’re going to make a sand castle, she lives right there behind the trees. They had a red plastic wagon and two five-gallon buckets they were filling with sand they scooped off the ground.
His name was Michael, and she was Sophie. He worked at the lumber and paper mills in the area, and was taking care of her until he had to leave for work.
There was sand in her red rain boot, he shook it off.
The morning was getting warm.
I remember Ashdown from the first year we worked with this circus, in 2008, there was a tornado coming and the lot flooded, and the thought of it is all dark and eerie.
This morning I went walking from the lot into town, a long slow walk, flat, past houses crumbling down and others well tended, closed shops, two men working on a car in their driveway, talking loudly, their bodies protruding from the hood, suit-stained grey, a guy in a pickup truck with a cowboy hat that disappeared into the truck’s ceiling, another with a long white beard driving an oversized farm tractor, passing me by, the shadow of someone saluting me with two fingers raised from behind the wheel of a grey Mustang down a deserted side street.
There are train tracks slicing along the town, and highway 67, and a river museum, a few fast food restaurants and a farm supplies store, and not much else.
As always we’ll be gone tomorrow.

My sister's house.

March 26, 2017, Caddo Mills (Texas.)

I’m on the road again. A milestone birthday with family, Nicolas turns ten this week; the two digits, the eternity of his being ten, if not quite, the memories, the memories in the making of the instant, the joy of being together, counting my blessings, there are too many.
Dylan kept trying to light his brother’s candles and failed over and over again, drowned by laughter. We sang in Spanish and in French and last in English so Nicolas got to blow his candles three times, and Dylan got to fail to light them many more, and try again, and the laughter engulfed us all.
We are staying at my sister’s house; my sister is not my sister but she is the only one, bursting with life and she makes me stronger. We are strong women in our own different ways, and family has nothing to do with our bond.
Her house in the plains of east Texas I make my canvas. Mobile homes are all around, pickup trucks, white men revving them up and down the potholed road, next to Latino families, like my sister’s, some circus families, like hers, and there are new developments over on the main Farm to Market road leading up to interstate 30 pushing the real estate prices up. It’s a landscape of desolation for me, and of wonder, in its foreignness. I know I should get to know the people who live here and shape the landscape to better understand how we got to where we are as a nation. It is one more line on the list of things I have to do to not die an idiot, as the French like to say.
My sister makes her brother’s circus suits, when she has time, and she didn’t get to clean the house before we arrived yesterday, so I made this picture.

Bring it on.

March 17, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

There are so many fires to put out, day after day, that is is hard to find time to do anything else. Call that rep, sign that petition, organize that meeting, work on that project, I forgot the milk, that’s what I went to the store for, manage freelance work, did I forget that appointment?, write letters to city officials because this is urgent, lives are at stake!, work, work, work to grow that business, feed the hens, sit down to eat, out out that next fire, breathe, enjoy the moment, love.
The boys are fine, they are getting a crash course in civics, like me, and activism, like me, last weekend we went to see the Met’s La Traviata at the movie theater and we had to leave early because people would be arriving soon for the meeting, and I had to get the house ready for twenty-five people to find space to sit in my living room, and I didn’t, they sat on the floor and stood in the back, and we had champagne because stepping up the fight doesn’t have to be boring, and the boys were happy anyhow, La Traviata was getting old by the last act for a nine-year-old, Minecraft awaited, and we were tired of popcorn.
Twenty years ago I photographed African seeking asylum in France and refuge in a Catholic church in Paris. The times haven’t changed much. Bearing witness through photography is as essential as ever, maybe more, because this time around the very notion of truth is on the line.
Photography is my truth, and my weapon of choice.
Bring it on.

In my backyard.

February 24, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

I find writing comforting, difficult, necessary.
I write in my mind, every day.
My backyard is a war zone. My heart?
It has been a warm winter, waiting for snow. The daffodils are out (how can that be?) and I worry about climate change. The ground is all misshapen in the backyard, sinister brown with patches of bare dirt spreading, is it the hens, stripping it bare, Marilou, La Rousse, Pitiblanche, Thing One and Thing Two, laying again since mid-January, big impossible eggs, blue eggs, white eggs, brown eggs, hah here’s to all of you Misters Make American White Again my backyard flock is a motley of colors and so is my family.
The ground is hard still but the trace of the moles’ invasion of this summer I still feel under my feet, the undulation, as I pace back and forth between the back door and the compost pile, the daily chores unfolding, comforting. Things are rotting. Promising.
The promise. My backyard is not a war zone but a promise.

The light.

February 1, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

There is the darkness all engulfing. And there is the light. That morning it was in the sky, out of the peculiar drawings of the clouds, the precise hue of the blue, and the white clapboard house. It was enough.
It was in the morning and I was walking up the short street that runs from the park behind the kids’ school to a busy street with the city’s recreation facility and a strip mall and the grocery store where I shop. I had walked with the boys and continued on after they entered school, there was the familiar crossing guard, she lives just there, the house with the big trees across the street, she had a hat on, it was crisp, even if far from one of these cutting cold Missouri winter days, I walked on to the gym, and my mind wandered, and its wanderings were stopped by the scene just above my walking vision, looking up there were plane trails crossing and dissolving in the pale blue, against the dark street below and the white house to the left, banal, not ugly. I did not stop, my mind stopped and lingered there, and I was light again, for a moment.
Light against the darkness that closes in when I brush against it in my core, not all around but right here in my life, and it scares me, but just so, and the light is there, I will always know. Photography is light. It is there, just like writing, and protesting.
There is joy in the protesting, and resisting ends, time and again, when the feet start to hurt and the kids start being too restless, it ends around a pizza at Shakespeare’s, the local pizza joint favored by journalism students because it is right across the street from the Journalism School, and by most of the town along with them.
Postcards from a Mid-western town where the darkness all around sometimes is in my heart too, but soon fades in shades of soft light blue.

Farewell to my president.

January 11, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

Watching President Obama talk last night for the last time, how bittersweet, and emotional.
Despite all the inevitable disappointments, because the world is so much more complicated and messy than we know, despite the shortcomings and all that with which we didn’t agree or in which we hope he had done more, Obama has carried himself throughout it all with such grace and poise and intelligence that it is hard not to feel acutely the pain of losing him as our leader and our voice in the world.
It has been an honor to become a citizen under his watch, to receive his letter welcoming me as a citizen of this nation.
A citizen.
I will take his words and work to carry them far, do the work of a citizen, roll up my sleeves and try to make this a better world, engage people and educate and help, but also work the best way I know, making pictures and sharing them and hoping that they help, however minimally, by providing a glimpse, a thought, in someone else’s world, and thereby advance the cause of tolerance, respect, inclusion, and love.
But it is in speaking about his family, his wife, his daughters, that Obama perhaps touched me the most.
Not just because his love and his respect and his dedication make me see the possibility of what could be, but because they make me see the possibility of what should be, in this so personal realm, the seed of our wider world.

The milk.

January 6, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

The diminutive waves on the surface of the milk when it is heating up. Their undulation. The folds as if of fresh-laundered sheets. Satin white. Dark bubbles lurking underneath.
It snowed yesterday, and it is achingly cold. The kids made a snowman that looks like a teepee; its hat and scarf and the two juggling balls they gave it for eyes were still there today when we checked after school. We had hot cocoa for dinner, because it felt like it, with the French bread the store bakes fresh in the evening. I stood watching the milk lest it burn and spill.
I stood there watching the little satin waves come up and dance like flames, soft and quick and supple, and disappear. Then the milk came to a near-boil and I turned off the heat. It was time to eat. The spell had come and gone, its job done.
It is a new year. The holidays are hard but these were fine, as they come, even joyous, and the happiness in small things still grows, in me, amidst the anguish of the new order and the monumental waves sweeping the world, and me, migrations and dislocations, hatreds, divisions, all the ugly, but also the yearning for connection, and the stubborn progress I want to believe we are still making in the direction of lofty goals like acceptance and respect.
Even though I’m always drawn to the darkness in photographs, I find the unnecessary and beautiful perfection of the little waves on the surface of the milk one more reason to cultivate hope, and write.