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.
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.
Dreams can be wonderful or terrifying, plebeian or absurd. But something dreamy? It’s almost always going to be ephemeral, gone with the next wind or whisper. Worth capturing (on what used to be called film, when much more effort was required to preserve it) in order to share and revisit it.
It’s going to be something that changes with all that changes around it. At even the most ancient places on the planet, it will change in the next frame, with the light and air and next skip of a stone across the autumn reflections on a pond’s surface.
It will transform with the next cell that reaches its limits, the next leaf that buds or falls, the next breath that is or is not taken.
You just never know where you might wander into a dreamscape, too impossibly beautiful and ephemeral to convince yourself you’d seen in the absence of photographic evidence. Your beagles may insist on following a scent trail when sunrise erupts in the thin space between a gray morning and a grayer day. Your daughter may invite you to visit her in India when peacocks are courting in Jodhpur. Fog just ahead of a storm system may fluoresce. You may take a last family trip to the end of the world as you will ever know it.
You can collect those dreamy images and share them.
I have only recently been freed from silence’s surlier bonds. Paradoxically, it’s left me a bit tongue-tied.
It’s hard to know where to begin, so I’ll start with a sunrise.
One that I doubt I’d otherwise have seen.
My son had taken me to what I’m told is one of the most photographed lighthouses in lighthouse-rich New England. Walking gingerly towards it, steadying myself on the arm of a son who’s grown to be almost his dad’s height, no other humans were in sight.
The light that began weaving through predawn dark was extraordinary. Bright orange began threading itself along the horizon. Magenta and lavender sprouted in patches on indigo sky. Then it turned to the most extraordinary pink display I’ve ever seen, before disappearing into an ordinary blue sky. No one who passed by after those suspended moments would have been any wiser to the magic.
The picture I’m sharing wasn’t of sunrise that year, or that day, or the surrounding ones. That deep blue-green camera had ended up shattered in the wreckage of my car, which I mercifully never saw again. The photographs of the damage were more than disturbing enough for me.
I was hit so ferociously hard and at such high speed that morning that my driver’s side door handle broke off and my car spun more than a full rotation, the driver’s side crushed in at the point of first impact, the rear bumper detaching at a second impact as I spun. I felt something spattering and thought it must be my blood, and wondered who would tell my children and look out for them. I was later told it was a mercy I’d been hit at just the angle at which my driver’s side airbag didn’t deploy, because it likely would have snapped my neck given my (not hefty) size.
Since that day I’ve felt like a shadow.
Fears I’d been so proud of leaving behind returned and magnified. I’ve been in intractable pain from spinal injuries, and a traumatic brain injury has taken away so much more. I’m not the same person. I’m not the mother I’ve needed to be. I lost the ability to do the job I loved nearly as well as victims deserve. I’m not even the writer I was. I’m tentative in a way that doesn’t feel anything like me.
And while overwhelmingly the people in my life have been beyond helpful and supportive and kind, I’ve also been dropped cold by two people I’d been a loyal friend to for years, revealed to be incapable of such bonds. That’s sometimes been a deeper blow than the physical pain.
But even in all this turmoil and pain, I’ve been blessed with the community here. In my rare appearances in the long interim when it was I who was a prospective witness and could not yet speak, I have been amazed and grateful at those of you who keep reading and giving me excuses to share my photos. I’ve even talked to some of you in real life (you know who you are, and thank you so much for checking in on me after I went silent).
Love in the Spaces 