Seventeen years is a long time.

 November 8th, 2022, Columbia, Missouri.

        My first-born will turn seventeen next week. He is a boy who looks just like his father, indigenous features kept untouched by my whiteness except for his hair, which falls soft and brown on his brow these days, to be brushed aside and don’t you mind it in your eyes, Dylan? Not his father’s deep-black hair, the Inca ancestors, more like the hazel hair of my youth, but his brown eyes, yes, and skin so dark in the summer, up to the rim of his lifeguard work shorts and shirt which hide a paleness that feels incongruous. 

One day when he and his younger brother by one year were tweens we went to a lake outside of town with friends, and I took pictures of Dylan in the spring waters, by himself; he looked like he was one with the waters. He has worked as a lifeguard since he could legally work, and if he has lost the boyishness in that photograph it does not feel like it to me.

It is fall in Missouri. Oscillating between summer and winter in the span of a day, the weather carries a light that caresses instead of vanquish. I live for light, the way it sculpts the image of the world on the retina, and the pictures we take of the world. It is fall and I have been looking for a job and I have not not found one, the season a mocking mirror of the trajectory of my still-borne career. The leaves crack and I see the decomposition needed for a successful compost, I see the beauty of their veins and patterns and colors and it staggers me, and makes me stop. I stop. I should stop longer and take the time to meditate. It was lifesaving during the years of heartbreak and self-inflicted darkness, the discipline of breathing consciously, of circling back to what it takes to take a picture, that stillness when all is ever changing. 

The waste of joy in those lost years feels like an insult now, looking back at the kids, the gift of them there then gone, the time with them I didn’t always savor, because I didn’t know how to. But now. Dylan turns seventeen next week and his being is still a wonder.

I am writing this at a cafe downtown, looking out the window onto the busy main street, and as I typed “wonder” and looked up, a beautiful woman with long white hair worn in a loose, wide ponytail, dressed in neutral-tone clothes flowing around her (or was it?) walked slid by and barely turned to look at me as she did and she was gone.

Vagabond.

March 10, Columbia (Missouri.)

Thanks to answering a query from the director of a poetry reading/performance I have been happily dragged into, against all reasonable facts, I have arrived to a definition of who I am on this day of continuum. Here goes:
I am a photographer, a mother, fighter.
Je suis une vagabonde, des pieds à l'âme.
(I am a wanderer, from the tip of my feet to the bottom of my heart.)
Struggle/la lucha is everywhere, and so is beauty. It is my responsibility to answer to both.

I have no fear.

February 28, 2018, Columbia (Missouri.)

Frank Bruni, the New York Times columnist, may be going blind.
I have been partially deaf since the age of twenty-three.
It has stopped me from applying for jobs, over the years, thinking I could not do good enough work because of my disability, although nobody ever told me so.
What great writing can do. Bruni's column on his disorder, a rare neurological degeneration caused by an "eye stroke," brought me to tears, and after all these years, to the realization that the only disability that prevented me from working at those editing jobs I never applied to was my own fear.
The obstacles and upsets that all people are faced with, as Bruni writes, do not stop them from doing what they do and pursuing their dreams, nor should they. The acknowledgment of our weaknesses only serves to remind us time and again of the beauty of the present moment.
There is no other.
After a year of waking up to the work of activism, the joy and the feeling of liberation of working toward a greater good, thanks to the new political (dis)order of the land that I now call home, after years waking up to myself stronger through the river of a journey of pain and discovery, on January 1st of this year I wrote "I have no fear" in big capital letters on the slate blackboard that hangs in the kitchen. It included a disclaimer: "Other than the big Ds: disease and death."
Thanks to Bruni's column, his description of what some people do living with a handicap much greater than mine, the strength and wonder in who they are and what they do, I can see now that even those fears are like the clouds of this grey winter day in the Midwestern plains, soft and part of the cosmos but without substance of their own.
I have no fear.
Only gratitude, for my disability is also your opportunity to embrace what is best in our humanity.

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.