In the Beginning and After the End

Our wedding anniversary today was off to a bit of a rough start. At about 2:45 a.m. and after a whopping 30ish minutes of sleep, I awoke to the kind of gut pain that reminded me once again I really do need a plan B for those occasions when a son or two doesn’t happen to be providing adult supervision.

Technically one of the anniversary celebrants isn’t here, but the four beings we welcomed within a handful of years now also grace this planet, and their father still accompanies them as well.

Given the borrowed 1800s wedding dress, from a trunk my mother’s friend happened to have picked up at an auction, you might think the first photo preceded the last by at least a good century-and-a-half, but only a blissful almost twenty-eight years separated them.

This is what newsprint looked like, kids.

The first picture looks so somber to me now, but not the second. In the second, our children are just out of sight, harmonizing with barking sea lions under a glorious equitorial sun. We all know this would be our last trip together in any traditional way.

We knew their father would die, as he did only weeks later, after we’d returned to the frigid Northeast. That day, snow fell as Spring began and all of us surrounded him at home.

Happy anniversary.

I found your card.

Closing Time….

Each closing time is of course also some other beginning’s end. More of another slide around a circle. We rarely know the exact moment anyone we love will no longer be traveling hand-in-hand with us (at least in a way others can see) or how thin the space between us may remain.

Sometimes we know that day will come all too soon.

Measured in traditional human time, this is a fairly momentous anniversary of one of those days of physical parting. The final days of my husband’s life, in our home, have haunted me so much that since then I’ve found myself fruitlessly packing up and fleeing, more than once, with assorted combinations of children and beagles and oh-so-much weight in ultimately ephemeral belongings. The things we carry.

I think that today, he’d want me to share some of the heavens I’ve seen in solitude over the years only because I heeded his wish to get outside. To breathe in the wee hours when I’d need to make room to see the big picture, where it’s never closing time.

Wings, Aloft and Fallen

Wings are among my photographs’ most frequent subjects.

I did not consciously plan a mini-trend, but my first novel has a fallen wing on its cover, while my first (and likely only) non-fiction book’s cover has frigates flying aloft in lavender twilight.

The picture of of the sheared-off wing is mine. I still cannot bring myself to contemplate how it was shorn. The photo could be the answer to a riddle: I took it in full color in black and white. My daughter and I were on a black sand beach in Iceland, where I was minutes away from slipping on black ice at the lower part of a cliff, breaking a leg not far from the bright white seafoam washing ashore.

The frigates were photographed by my husband, aloft above him and soaring over equatorial waters, on this side of the veil, as of course my husband was then.

I have been lucky enough to see and photograph winged creatures on other continents since then, wishing every second all of us could have been together, but feeling the connection between what’s earthbound and heaven sent.

Neither Done nor Dusted

Ephemera fades at warp speed during fall in New England. Sometimes one can see each phase of a life cycle within a single fallen leaf.

Photographs and photographers are keepers of otherwise ephemeral memory, both for the person behind the lens and whatever was captured.

I continue to seek out and hoard such images. They seem incomplete unless I can share them. I’m delighted when someone else sees something worth capturing in their unconventional beauty. A partially skeletonized leaf or a rainbow in an oil slick. An arthritic lavender leaf atop a bed of dessicated seagrass.

There’s beauty to be found in redolent colonies of late-season barnacles and in chipped shells and seaweed calligraphy on icy sand. The star shape within a tree trunk’s severed stump. Encrusted docks hauled out of the Atlantic for winter

And there’s a wonder and a comfort in the way such treasures fade and disappear but make their way back, in new generations, for however long anything that dances with light can stay.