What else can I
call them but “snapshots”? We have these moments in our life when time becomes
so irrelevant it is almost irreverent to even think about it.
Before leaving
my home, a photographer friend asks me to stand in my red shirt against a
rainbow-stitched weaving from Guatemala so she can take a picture of me to put
in her phone. At the last instant, I become a self-conscious teenager again and
make the same gaping, open-mouthed expression of delighted surprise. It’s a
hideous photograph. My friend says it makes her smile.
The wind
suddenly comes, unannounced and with no warning. The thin lower branches on the
tree are shaking, shivering, almost bowing. It reminds me of the Japanese
tradition of greeting: to bow lower, in
alternating rhythm again and again, always trying to pay deeper homage, more
respect, to the other.
I gently place
my hand atop my new hospice patient’s as I tell her I’ll come back to visit
another day. She grabs my hand with both of hers and holds on tightly despite
the papery frailty of her bird-like fingers. She beams a smile, wide and
bright, through my eyes and into my soul.
I hold a
humongous red poppy in my two hands, cupped like the caress of a lover. I feel
the nighttime’s rain on the waxy/papery petals. I rub my finger on the inside
of the petal and the purple powder comes off, wet like paint on my finger. I
can write a book with that deep, black-purple ink.
I see her dash,
my Sage – dog of all chasiness. Far down the wet-pebbled beach she goes in
order to play with the river otter she sees bobbing up and down in the small
windy waviness of the Sound, a few yards from shore. That otter teases her -
coming closer, backing up – testing my dog’s apparent resolve never to dog
paddle except in emergencies. I silently thank that part of my dog that
prevents her from remembering she knows how to swim.
A red flash! I
gasp. The sapsucker. Back again this year. He darts to the thin alder, second
tree in from the edge of the road. A while later I am driving: a robin flies horizontal to my path, fast
enough to avoid my windshield…but only by a few inches. I gasp again.
A friend says
“hug me again” when I come to visit her at work. She is telling me about the
“senseless” murder of her coworker, a mother of two young children. Her eyes
fill with tears and I wonder why they don’t spill out down her cheek, soaking
her shirt, making a river that runs out the open warehouse door behind her.
Re-member your own moments this week, the ones that stood still in the busy fray of your day.
Reweave one of those memories back into the fullness of your life by giving it
attention, cherishing it, seeing how it is your
experience because of the unique way in which you responded. Never count how long it lasted. Honor it by the sweetness of remembering.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
