Since late December I've been overcome with a deep nostalgia. The morning after Christmas my grandfather passed from his earthly body into the great beyond. He had been a rock for our extended family, an anchor to which we all held. We as a family have gathered around him and my late grandmother for the entirety of our lives. In this gathering we have grown as individuals and more deeply into ourselves. The sense of place they created, the life with which they imbued every moment, has informed a great deal of who I am, and serves as an endless well of inspiration. Back in January, knowing that the home in which they resided for over sixty years was soon to be passed out of our family, I took a trip with my girls in tow to attempt to capture some of my own memory.
I had a deep yearning for my girls to experience a bit of my own childhood, the hours picking raspberries and wandering through the fields, sneaking chocolate from high up kitchen cabinets, pondering the plants in my grandmother's greenhouse, sitting with my grandparents watching the muppets during cocktail hour...I wanted to, at the very least, put my children into the space where so many of my memories come from, chronicle brief moments so that they might remember or imagine a little of what being there was like.
In our brief time making memory there I tried to capture some semblance of the magic that existed in our midst. Since then I've been a bit obsessed with harnessing memory before it slips like so much sand through our fingers. Part of this seems informed by a sense of the fleetingness of each moment, the fact that my own girls are already four and seven, that in not too many years the magic of childhood will shift into the moodiness of adolescents and perhaps our closeness will shift. All of it, of course, is ever shifting, and that's the beauty right?
So here I am with a camera in hand, grasping at the ephemera around me. I long to chronicle snippets of the past combined with life in the present, and have been cajoling friends and coaxing my own kids to let me capture these moments for them. Last weekend my girls and I packed up the car and took a jaunt out to two magical spots. One where we watched a puppet show cabaret in an old dairy barn, and the other where we frolicked with dandelions and the endless wishes that they offer. These are a few of the moments that slipped around us on a summer's like eve. The banter of these two had me giggling as they imagined themselves and their wishes down a secret dirt road to an oasis in the woods.
They were the forest bound wood sprites creeping out to gather dandelion, root, leaf and seed, to feed upon and wish...
They conjured me the suspect lady with a lens peeping on their adventures. I tried to blend into the grasses, my hair waving before my eyes, dangling like so many branches around us.
There was an over grown garden, stone walls, woods and fields. We called this day Bliss.