WEEK SIXTEEN: TEN THINGS I’VE LEARNED IN 35 YEARS OF MARRIAGE

Monday was our 35th wedding anniversary.  I recently made this image of Sandhill Cranes (who mate for life) and I thought it would align perfectly with my reflections on the past 35 years:

  1. I’ve learned that one can survive being taught golf by your husband.
  2. I’ve learned that women share and men fix, metaphorically speaking. Don’t share unless you are willing to let him tell you how to fix it.  Actually, I still haven’t mastered that one.
  3. I’ve learned that “I can change” means “You’ll get used to it”.
  4. You do get used to it.
  5. I’ve learned that I am “high-maintenance” – something my family never got around to telling me.
  6. I’ve learned that child-rearing represents just a phase of your married life, even though it seems like your entire life while it’s in progress.
  7. I’ve learned that occasionally spending time apart is a bit like pruning your shrubs – it encourages healthy growth.
  8. I’ve learned that the things that you believe are so important in the beginning are relatively unimportant years later, and vice versa.
  9. I’ve learned that you can feel safe and happy with someone without talking or even being in the same room for hours on end.
  10. I’ve learned that having someone to scratch your head, warm up your coffee and serenade you with “On the Street Where You Live” is worth more than a lifetime of Valentine’s Day dinners out.

WEEK FIFTEEN: BELIEVING

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It’s almost dreamlike, this memory.  Christmas music playing in another room, best holiday dresses, itchy white tights & patent leather shoes, two little girls watching while mom dresses the third and youngest for Christmas Eve.  Being older, we were in on the secret.  Dad was making his way in the snowy darkness to just outside the bedroom window and was about to ring the jingle bells and shout “ho-ho-ho” – his way to fuel the excitement and dispel any doubts about Santa, reindeer and the need to be good for twelve straight months.  Funny, though.  For just a moment, when the bells and familiar shout rang out, Santa was really there and I was a believer once more

WEEK FOURTEEN: WATER MOCCASINS

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I know very little about Native Americans, and less about the Timucua, who were among the early inhabitants of Florida.  But what a magical existence they must have enjoyed here on this unusual river.  Their story is the familiar tragedy; the population was decimated by the mid-1700s and the last few individuals deported to Cuba.

Often when I gaze out at the river, with no other witnesses save the occasional curious otter, I am reminded of those first and rightful owners.  I feel their presence, especially in fog.  Each day this past week, they appeared in that ephemeral fog, slipping in on silent moccasins before each early twilight and lingering until forced into hiding by the warmth of morning sun.

WEEK THIRTEEN: LIFE OF A COOT

Coots are interesting birds – more like chickens than ducks.  There is a healthy community of these birds near my house where they are a permanent fixture, darting around their pond making half-hearted honking noises.

I sometimes wonder if each has its own identity: this one’s high-maintenance and that one’s always late, or forever losing things, or missing the point.  Do they fret that Christmas is in only eleven days, pine for a new kitchen, or eschew a future on fixed income?  Are there red and blue flocks of coots?

I think not.  They seem to be all about feeding themselves and making room for more food, the darting around focused entirely on that objective.

But you never know.

WEEK TWELVE: SILK PURSE FROM A SOW’S EAR

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After dinner, the conversation went something like this.

“There’s gonna be a full moon tomorrow morning, setting right before sunrise.  Conditions should be perfect for a shot I have in mind of the moon setting over the gulf, in twilight, up at Crystal River beach by the pier.  Wanna go with me?”  This is not really an invitation.  I want him to go with me – mostly because I’m a wimp when it comes to adventures in the dark by myself.  But he knows exactly what I mean, so I don’t need to be direct.

“It’s a long way out there,” he says, cleverly dodging the question.  “We’ll need to leave the house by about 5:30, out of bed by 5:00.”  That’s a strategy he’s had some success with – casually pointing out the flaws in my plan in the hope that I will realize my folly and withdraw the request.  Problem solved.  Back to his Castle rerun.

But I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.  “We can leave at 6:00.  It only takes about 15 minutes to get to Fort Island Trail.  Maybe another 20 minutes out to the water.  And I’ll be quick once we get there.  I know the exact shot I’m looking for.”

Silence.

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“Maybe I’ll just see how I feel when I wake up.”  Check-mate.  No commitment, decision postponed.

As it turns out, it was all moot.  Heavy fog obscured both sun and moon at curtain time.  Instead, I went by myself to my favorite sunrise spot and found this treasure.  A low-lying backlit fog bank to my east, stained pink-orange by early morning sun, was spilling that soft light everywhere.   For the past several winters, I’ve been trying to capture what my mind sees when I look up at these lacy branches, limbs adorned with ball moss.  Maybe things work out better when you just go with the flow.

WEEK ELEVEN: 29 NOVEMBER 1947

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WEEK ELEVEN:

29 NOVEMBER 1947

Yesterday, while culling through photographs from our son’s recent wedding, I suddenly realized that November 29 is my parents’ wedding anniversary.  That thought has not really been all that significant to me in the past, but I guess it now had context, given what I had just been part of.  That set me to thinking about what that day in 1947 was all about.  So, I called my 89-year-old mother to ask about the details.  She was, of course, happy to oblige.  After all, how often is an 89-year-old widow specifically asked to reminisce about anything, let alone a wedding day 68 years ago?

We have a few photographs from that day – smiling faces frozen in time.  I know that my mom and dad were married in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, at St. John Catholic Church.  Those photos were taken after the ceremony and in front of the church’s big red doors.  My dad wore a 3-piece suit, a red tie and a fedora; my mom wore a dark suit and wide-brim straw bowler and carried a big bouquet of flowers.  Both looked radiant.  But that’s about all I knew.

This was the most exciting day of my mom’s life.  On the day of the wedding, my dad and his widowed mother drove to my maternal grandparents’ home in Fort Lee, New Jersey.  Then the five of them – mom, dad and my three grand-parents – all drove to Old Saybrook in George’s big sedan, where they met up with siblings from both sides of the family and a few friends.  Mom recalled that they had to stop on the way to pick up her corsage – a seemingly insignificant detail that has stayed with her for almost seven decades.

My uncle Gene was my dad’s best man, and my mom’s best friend Mary McConnell was her matron-of-honor.  Afterwards, they all went to Casa Mana Restaurant in Teaneck, New Jersey, to celebrate.  I looked that up on Google – it was apparently a very popular place in the 1940s and 1950s.

Mom and Dad set up housekeeping in an apartment in Hackensack.  Rent was $50/month.  Dad was working as a security guard for a trucking company at $50/week, a job that my grandfather secured for him.  Her parents gave the newly-weds a bed, a table-and-chairs and a television to get started – along with a set of good china, which was their “official” wedding present.  I picked up an identical set of that china in an antique store in Roswell, Georgia, in 1995 and I believe with all my heart that it is the same exact set, chips and all.  Anyway, my mom took a job at Oppenheimer Collins department store.  They didn’t own a car, so she had to walk to work – rain, shine or snow.   But she assured me that they were deliriously happy.   They didn’t have much, but they went dancing on Saturday nights, enjoyed 10-cent beers, and planned their lives together.  Simpler times, eh?

WEEK TEN: THE OTHER WOMAN

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I love my son, Tim, dearly.  I love my daughter, too, but she’s not the subject of this post (sorry, Molly – another post for you).  Tim was married Saturday evening, in an amazingly beautiful and meaningful Captiva Island ceremony, and I was the “mother of the groom”.  I truly didn’t see that coming and was unprepared.

As it turns out, the mother-of-the-groom role, though short-lived, is pretty significant to the woman experiencing it – more significant than I had thought.  In hindsight, here’s the way I see it.  You are a boy’s mother, and he’s your son, from the first moment and for a lifetime.  That’s a wonderful role, and a straightforward one that involves only mother and son.  But the mother-of-the-groom role is completely contingent on the appearance of another woman on the stage.  There’s a yin and a yang to it; the term “mother-of-the-groom” can only take shape when the stage is shared.  Think about it – the term itself connotes two different relationships at once – mother and son, son and bride.  More importantly, it suggests an important transition in the son’s life.

As I said, I love my son and I still feel that same emotional tug when I watch him, or say good-bye to him, just like I did when he was a vulnerable-seeming little boy.  But more importantly, now, I am sweetly happy for him as he stands beside his beautiful and intelligent bride, Tracey, and looks out at a future full of shared possibilities.

My heart is full.

WEEK NINE: PETIT MAGIC

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I really didn’t want to leave my warm bed to drive down the mountain in the frosty early November air but was determined to capture the magic of “civil” twilight – that few minutes before sunrise that photographers are obsessed with – at Lake Petit on my last morning in the North Georgia mountains.  I wanted classic pink-gold light coupled with dramatic cloud formations for my own iconic fall image of lake, mountains and sky.  Alas, a cloudless sky and a short twilight cheated me of that shot.  Heading back to the car, I noticed a small maple tree, its newly-turned leaves glowing warmly against the soft blue-green of the lake below me, and realized all the magic I needed was right here in front of me.  [Intentional camera movement, double exposure].

WEEK EIGHT: THE POND

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There is a small pond in the woods near our house.  The pond is an attraction to me, though small.  It changes regularly, with the seasons, the weather and the time of day, and I enjoy making pictures there.  A turtle of considerable size lives in the pond – we spotted each other once, before he slipped into the blackness.

I’ve never seen anyone else at the pond.  I suspect that folks from the hills higher up drive by this spot regularly, intent on making their way off the mountain, unaware of the pond and its turtle.  And truthfully, most would have little interest anyway.  And that is their loss.

As Thoreau said of Walden Pond, “it is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush–this the light-dust cloth–which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.”