{Preview} Gus

When you have a newborn, time blurs like grass beneath your swing.  Four days to four months to four.  Hours move slowly.  Looping, knitting themselves into an endless stream.  Dreamlike because of exhaustion, and the desperate sort of love you wade in.  

I ached for the time when my children were small as I watched Anna and her Gus - swinging him slowly, gingerly, tender - like a bare beating heart on her sleeve.  Never more than a fingertip between them, his palms clenched and twisting fistfuls of hair.  Molding to her any-which-way.  It's a wonder how so many minutes of deep, silent, wordlessness can speak so loud and clear.

Working Hands.

My parents taught us hands were made for working.  And when we worked, we worked together.  Sometimes we made beautiful things; sometimes we worked on things that just needed to be done.  But whatever it was, I never saw my mother or father hire a plumber or contractor, painter or landscaper.  We did everything with our own hands.  We painted walls, held ladders so my father could scale too-high places, pushed wheelbarrows, learned to grout and lay tile.  Our small hands worked alongside theirs.  When I think of all the important things my parents have taught my siblings and me over the years, this is the one I always come back to:  hands are made for working.  The older Jane and Henry grow, the more I love watching them develop a relationship with their hands.  Holding, building, digging, gripping, never too young to realize the strength, flexibility, and thoughtfulness embedded in each small finger, direct extensions of their soul. 

{Preview} Amnesia

I never go more than a few hours without taking a string of photos.  But it has been a few cold, wintry weeks since I have shot children other than my own, and now that the earth is plush and forsythia’s burst everyone seems itchy to book a shoot.  I am unseasoned enough that inquiries still make my heart race wild, crushing over the thought of new faces, crafting images, and capturing children doing what they do best - being beautiful.  Then about ten seconds later, I am pacing the kitchen.  Panicked.  The dog is in the way.  I’m tripping over Legos, in a fog.  Was that ME they wanted to take photos of their family?  Quickly I’m searching catalogues for my favorite images, peeking into the blackness of my camera bag to remind myself…  YES!  I have a camera!  I have done this before!

Over the years I have given canvases that took months to complete away to complete strangers.  A few years ago, I released a handcrafted birdcage, painstakingly made with minute nails and a tiny saw into a dumpster.  I have spent too many dollars framing paintings and sketches that are now ever-so-carefully stacked against a wall in my basement.  The older I get the longer the trail in my wake.  A tangled mess of unwanted, unfinished, just-not-good enough.

This weekend, I asked a dear friend with a long history in the performing arts if seasoned actors ever get over stage fright.  He looked at me deadpan, and said, if they do, there is something wrong with them.  I took this as no remedy needed for the oversized Monarchs doing lazy circles in my stomach.  Sometimes the only medicine for this fierce amnesia of mine is a batch of photos like these -- deliriously lovely children, goofing around, light setting the hair around their faces on fire.

So I look.  Then remember: pick up the camera again. 

Let the spring season begin.

            

Shedding a layer

The morning began with a shove - long legs burrowing, feet trampling warm sheets like ice in my cocoon.  Can I read to you?  I blink back yellow light as she opens a huge book, no pictures, and words fall on my ears.  A string of monotone in that raspy voice, the same it’s been since she first demanded MILK!  Only now it’s streaming vowels and consonants, moving, mixing, shuffling sounds to match the letters on the page. Back, back, back to sleep, until she needed me again to sound out concoctions of PH’s or OUGH’s that still elude her growing bank. 

How did this happen?  A little girl with a fat book in her lap?  Baby layers are all around her - peels on the floor.  Forever, it seemed the only moment Jane would pile in my lap was to hear a story.  Now this.  QUIET.  Words rounding and rising under her breath.   She doesn’t need me.  I want to shed tears, this milestone feels too big, but see the wonder in her eyes, delight in her voice.  As we drive through town, "Mommy does that say SHAW’S?  BAKERY?  Hmm, I knew it.”  Soft triumph, her feathers puff.  She’s strutting.  And singing proudly into the morning light.

Deep

How quickly it passed: that one moment deep in February when crimson toes and running bottomless on the beach was just right.  When eyelids barely fluttered before bed, after sun and celadon water hit our winter bodies like a sack of sand.  We dreamt of screeching pelicans, twisting coral and dolphins chasing us, lean in the water.  White light everywhere.  Today eight days in Florida feels far, faraway as I watch the kids stuff wool socks into boots and swipe at breath billowing from pink mouths like frozen, thick-winged butterflies.

Sweet just like the Color of a Beet

February wears thin, and our windows are smoked with fingerprints.  Green grass feels distant, cocooned beneath layers of gray.  Somehow a mild winter still makes us hungry for the world outside, as the days are tinged with waiting.  Luckily, we were invited this weekend to our friends’ cozy spot on the Cape tucked near a salt river and the sea, respite from the grind. The weekend felt like a string of contented moments adding up to a song, with every corner of this home curated, beautiful, feasts for winter eyes.  Wooden birds, carved spoons, giant swags of felt, apple seeds.  Children happily lost in mounds of pillows, masks, twisted pines, and the sound of electric tambourines.  Steaming coffee, clinking dishes, cats-eye-marbles – all endless melody, as we crafted lines of matchbox cars, iced yellow cake, caught up, and let all things just be for 48 hours.  There just isn’t better medicine this time of year.