Weekly Photo Challenge – Love in the Spaces

Purple Chimes and Valentines

“Sweet as” was in the glossary I picked up from fellow travelers during my recent adventure.

It’s a New Zealand term of assurance: all is well, “no worries” (a phrase that now hits my ear as well-meaning but oxymoronic, a double-negative coupling of “no” and brow-furrowed “worries”; like being told not to envision a pink elephant, if I’m told not to worry, I’m going to worry).

Where “no worries” comes to a declarative full stop, the object-less “sweet as” is gloriously open-ended, and calls to mind all my (slightly belated) Valentines.

The list is, as we say in the business, not limited by enumeration.

Sweet as….

My friend Barbara’s face when I first saw her, not knowing she’d made the long trip, downstairs at Phillips Church after hundreds of people had paid their respects and filed out. (She does not know that the purple glass chimes she gave me years ago now hang on the window overlooking my Brady’s garden. Their gentle clinking restores the missing sound of his bright blue tags as he made his way from flower to flower.)

The friend who told me he’d be there in ten minutes–from another state, on a traffic-filled holiday weekend–when I desperately texted that I had to make an unbearable decision about my beloved middle beagle, then dispensed (and even re-collected) a stream of tissues to me in the aftermath.

My newest friends, who made me laugh harder than I have in years, picked me up when I slipped on Morocco monkey ice (story to come), taught me Australian card games, and tried fruitlessly to contain me from overspending my dirham.

George, a wildly busy colleague whose wife had died when his children were very young. He always took my calls, called me when I had been silent too long, and knew when it was time for me to go back to the job I loved.

Joe and Diane, who showed up to help me move a daughter into her freshman dormitory when Jim could not, and who took all of us into their home when the same daughter graduated.

A network of people I’ve never met in person, who take the trouble to read my blog and leave me messages about posts and share their own thoughts.

Friends who sent me flowers on Mother’s Day and after my father died, who helped my children when I could not get to them because of competing crises in other states and countries, who shared their own heartaches with us and helped us see “the size of the cloth.”

G., who secured for me the music for Jupiter and in whose office I knew I could always appear and get my bear hug without needing to speak.

Bethany, whom I met getting ready to go on a great big stage where we both told our stories, and arranged for me and my son to hear a long sold-out John Hiatt show after I told her the story of the golden CD my husband had burned for me years before I found it.

Jim’s lifelong friends, who visited him when he was sick and brought him a touchstone of their shared past, and who still invite me to their family events and allow me to be a part of theirs and their children’s and even their grandchildren’s lives. Jim’s family, who became my family long ago.

David Subnaught (so-dubbed to distinguish him among many distinguished college Davids), a classmate of Jim’s who flew from Colorado to the East Coast to be there for my eldest son’s graduation two months to the day after Jim died.

Tineke, my best woman, the first person I called. She literally fed me, cooking from scratch the only things she knew would tempt me, when I could not manage even that. Best man Jon, who drove to us on the night we finally brought Jim home bearing pictures he’d taken the night before our wedding and had us all laughing so hard we may have unnerved our children. Randy and Judy. Dr. Bob.

You know who you are.

Melting into Monochrome

ocean 439

For just moments at sunrise and sunset, late summer light sets fire to the earth and sea; the view melts into monochrome.

Alchemy turns everything to variegated gold.

Tone blends into tone, a subdued rainbow’s edge. Light catches creatures and creations we might easily have missed. Heaven touches down within our reach.

Angling for Answers

If you buzz regularly by my blog you may have noticed my proclivity for ridiculous angling in attempting to get photographs of ephemera that catches my fancy.

I teeter in heels up snow-covered rocks to catch sunset. I wriggle in less than pristine spring dirt to point my lens up at a blase butterfly. Just last night I swayed on a rapidly disappearing rock jetty as the tide crashed in and seagulls screamed and swooped at me. It was like a scene out of The Birds, but I got my shot.

seagullover

An unusual angle on a familiar scene can tell a story, and give hints about the events and moods behind it.

My children and I recently attended their sister’s commencement and related festivities. Thousands upon thousands of people were on hand snapping pictures on cameras and tablets and phones–in so far as black and orange umbrellas could shield the electronics.

I’ve picked out some different angles on the celebration: the view from inside my rain poncho at commencement, some of my progeny to my right as they clapped for an award recipient in my daughter’s department, and the steel paw of her school’s mascot.

I paused there in front of a sculpture my husband had never seen, on a campus where so much and so many had been added since the last time he set eyes upon it, and added my own salt tears to the mix, wishing he could have lived to see this, every part of this, the steam punk paw, our astoundingly accomplished daughter and her supportive sister and brothers, the never-ending rain.

Half-Full

(Painted) Line of Demarcation, Beacon Hill, Boston

We lawyers are fond of what is known in the business as the “bright line distinction.” We like the assurance of knowing what falls on each side, though the adversarial battle in a given case tends to focus on pinpoint holes in the line–which after all ultimately may be as porous as the rainbow’s edge.

I aspire to be a half-full glass type of person, but founder on that line. I still tend to focus on the downturn, the mask’s saddened side. Flags at half staff. Storm clouds arrayed in equal measure with gathering blue. Half finished. Done and undone. The half-life of love and of grief. The missing pieces.

butterflies3 012 — *Half-Transparent Half-View*

Half-and-half is far easier to capture in pictorial form: half cloudy, semi-submerged, partially in focus. Divided into land or sky or sea; demi-sentient; half-revealed, as with a wink, a mid-cycle moon, or a tree’s split fallen fruits; a vista of one side of the color spectrum at dawn, by halves bitter and sweet. Somehow both part of and alone in this dazzling world.