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.