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.