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.