Category Archives: family

Family photos.

They count.

They always count.

They count when your babies are all new.  And you’re so proud of how they can hold their head up by themselves, and you’ve picked out two perfect outfits, because you know they’ll poop and spit up all over the first one.

They count when your toddlers are running around and when you’ve about given yourself an anxiety attack getting them wrestled into their car seats and now you really owe your husband because this is his exact idea of what hell looks like.  Family photo time = hell time.

They count when the house is quiet.  When bedrooms are empty.  When college towns are close, but not close enough.  They count maybe more now than ever.  They count because, my God.  The kids are gone. It’s just us again.  Remember when it was just us?

Rediscovering  just us.

The simplicity of just us.

The newness, but also the memory, of just us.

The quiet, sweet ache of just us.

And when we are all together again?

The familiar just the four of us.  The sweetness of that number.

four.

all of us.

When you have tiny babies all swaddled up in blankets, old heavily perfumed church ladies are free with their advice.  Don’t blink.  They say.  Before you know it, they’ll be grown.  But you wish you could blink.  You wish you could stay blinked.  You wish your eyes could just stay closed.  Just stay closed all night…  Please.  Just one night of sleep.

But then, somehow, that passes.  You don’t think it ever will, but just like the church ladies said it would, it passes.  Oh my gosh, they were right.  That happened so fast!

Then they are walking.  Then talking.  Then talking back.  Then borrowing your clothes.

Suddenly, looking at your tiny baby looks like looking into a mirror.

Oh, my God.

Don’t blink.

Don’t blink.

 

They met on a San Francisco street.  He was on shore leave during WWII with some of his Navy buddies, and she was out for a night on the town with her girlfriends.  She dropped her handbag.  He picked it up.  That’s the end of the story, and the beginning of the story.  In that moment their lives ended, and a new life began.  

My grandparents’ beginnings could not have been any more different…  She was a trained dancer, an artist and a beauty queen.  Every six months a seamstress came to the house to take her measurements so that season’s wardrobe could be made.  While my Grandfather…  He was keeping the fire burning, at the bootlegging distillery that his family had hidden in the woods of Kentucky.  Then he jumped on a train at fourteen and headed west to California.  At sixteen, he lied about his age and joined the Navy.  Two different worlds.  But those differences never amounted to much.  Everything changed when he picked up that handbag.

I came along much later, when their life together was already strongly established.  She had already learned to cook…  (not a small feat when you grew up with servants who did all the cooking for you.)  The two of them had traveled, crashed parties in Mexico and danced all night with Mexican dignitaries, stomped grapes in California with Portuguese immigrants, broke horses, rode in rodeos, spread oil paint on hundreds of canvases, and raised two children together by the time I came into the picture.  As a child I enjoyed their love and laughter, not realizing how special they truly were.  They were just my grandparents.

We would get snowed in at their house in the foothills of Denver, and have to eat crackers and cans of sardines by candlelight when the power went out.  We visited New York when I was eleven, and I had my heart set on peeking through the windows of the crown at the top of the Statue of Liberty’s head.  My grandmother walked up hundreds of steps holding my hand and urging me on.  My Grandfather rarely caught a fish when he took me fishing at the lakes down the dusty dirt road from their house…  How could he, when he spent all of his time untangling my line?  But he taught me how to be patient.  To sit very still with my finger on the delicate line, the wind blowing ripples across the water and my hair across my face.  How to tell the difference between my hook merely bumping over a rock at the bottom, and the feel of a trout really taking hold.  Once, when I was a sophomore in college, I called them the week before my summer break.  I announced that we should take a trip.  Just the three of us.  Their only question was to ask where I wanted to go…  They packed up their trailer and we drove to New Mexico as soon as I finished my finals.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I began to comprehend what a rare treasure I had in my grandparents.  As individuals they were wonderful people.  But it was really how they worked together as a couple that strikes me the most now.  When you grow up with that kind of perfectly choreographed companionship, you don’t question it.  It just… is.  I never thought twice about the way they always held hands.  Always.  In the living room, at a crowded party, in a parking lot.  They were together.  Always.  The way they filled in the blanks of the stories they would tell together.  Tales of love and war, sunken ships, bootlegging and gold nuggets along roadsides.  The way she would snuggle under the crook of his arm and say, “Hi there, Sailor!” and giggle like a teenager. How he always remembered to bring a sweater for her when they left the house, because he knew she would get cold.  Or how he washed the dishes every night after she made dinner.  Then they would dance barefoot in the kitchen, the dishtowel still in his hand.  

They were two distinct stars.  Blazing, brilliant and beautiful in their own right.  But together they made their own unique constellation.  Just they two…  Dancing together in orbit.

My Grandfather passed away last year.  I took these photos of the two of them when I was there to celebrate their 90th birthdays.  Just three short months later he was gone.  These were some of the last photographs taken of them together.  I honestly don’t know how she does it now.  There is an empty space there that used to hold so much.  It hurts my gut to even think about it.  But she is strong.  So, so very strong.  Like I said, she is her own brilliant shining star.  But I think he is still with her, still holding her hand.  Still keeping her in orbit with the gravitational pull of his love.  A love that cannot ever die.  Still holding her hand.  Still dancing.

written in 2014, as seen in Beyond the Wanderlust Magazine, Edition VI

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He sees you…  Like no one else sees you.

It’s almost unnerving.

This child.  This…  little watcher.  In only a tiny glance he takes your measure.  He instinctively know the things…  the things you don’t tell, the things you can’t tell.  That you couldn’t tell if you tried.

Jack know the things.  All of the things.  And somehow, miracle of miracles…  He reaches for your hand anyway.  He is open to you in a way that your heart longs for. The way the whole world is open to you when you are in that happy, warm, hazy space between awake and asleep when the best dream is still there…  Almost close enough to feel with your fingertips.  He takes you in without question.  He loves you for the person you can be, the person you want to be.

How?  How does a little boy who cannot speak say all of this?

Because he is Jack.

And Jack, is magic.

for more of Jack’s story and to learn more about my work, and the work of photographers worldwide, check out Spectrum Inspired,  A beautiful organization I am very proud to be a part of.  

When I was in my early twenties, I wanted to be at the end.  The end of my story.  I was overwhelmed.  Afraid.  Terrified, even.  I didn’t see this exciting chapter as an adventure full of potential.  I saw it as a field of landmines.  No road signs.  Barbed wire.  One wrong misstep and I would blow my whole life.  I just wanted to be  past all of the choices.  I wanted to look at all of those decisions through my rear view mirror.  Serenely.  With wisdom and peace.  I wanted the big decisions to already be made, magically decided with magic zero effort pixie dust, and fine outcomes.  Not perfect, mind you.  I’ve always know that life isn’t perfect.  But I wanted to skip the mess and go straight on to the aged wisdom.  Twenty years later.  I didn’t get pixie dust.  Instead I made choices.  Hard ones.  Easy ones.  Some of them made themselves, for better or worse.  There are still huge decisions now that I’m forty and no longer twenty.  There are still no real road signs.  Or, too many road signs, depending on how you look at it.  I’m still the same me.  Still stumbling.  Still occasionally getting tangled in the barbed wire. If anything, now the stakes are even higher, because I am no longer the only player.  But i’m no longer terrified of my own life.  I know that there are great works ahead of me.  The stage is set, the lights are dimming.  I am in a constant state of butterflies in my stomach, yes.  Butterflies.  Excitement.  Sometimes the nervous giggles, even.  And I let myself feel it.  The uncertainty and the wild spontaneity of a life lived.  In the moment.  This moment.  This spark of joy.  Now.  Big moments on the stage are coming…  Yes.  They’re coming.  But I am learning that the little moments between the big scenes bring their own kind of joy.  Their own unique sweetness.  These are the moments that I want to sink into with my whole heart.  Soak them up through my skin.  Breathe them into my lungs with full, great, slow breaths.  Stay there with those moments until they are part of me, never to leave.  The quiet, in-between joys of an ordinary life. 

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