photographs

For the third year, inspired by Susannah Conway’s August Break, I’m going to post only photographs for August.  I actually love taking pictures and do so every single day (you can see more on instagram, where I’m lemead).  I am already aware of fall underneath summer’s heavy heat and I want to sink into these last weeks.  I’ve written before that I suspect my August birthday, right at the moment the world seems to pivot towards fall, contributes to my sense of myself as a liminal being.  My instinct is to lunge forward, to rush into what’s coming because it’s painful to feel it on the horizon.  But over and over again I try to push that impulse back, to be here now, to fully live these last golden hours of the summer.  Wish me luck.

Space family

From the Air & Space Museum at Dulles.  This was surely a highlight of our family trip to Washington in March.  We saw the plane my paternal grandfather designed and the plane my maternal grandfather flew.  I had the Navy hymn in my head all day.  The kids loved it.

Last weekend, Grace’s best friend from camp came to visit.  This friend is the daughter of my best friend from camp.  The sheer fact of this, and the way I kept seeing my friend’s face in her daughter’s, made me dizzy several times this weekend.  Talk about vertigo: then, now, us, them, summer, the ocean, winter, tears, girls, women … it all blended together in a meteor shower of memory.  Grace is still crying about her friend having left.  Only two months until camp, I keep telling her.

Last weekend, in search of a picture of my mother and me, I leafed through our wedding albums for the first time in many years.  We were married in the dark ages, which is to say the pre-digital photography era.  This is one of my favorite pictures of all, because it reminds me of the way I was surrounded on my wedding day by both matrilineage and friends.  This seems apt right now, in this season when we celebrate all things maternal.

You can see my mother (isn’t that a beautiful color that she’s wearing?), and on my right hand, along with my engagement ring, I’m wearing her mother’s wedding ring.  She was my only grandparent not present at our wedding, though her spirit was absolutely tangible to me, in both her ring on my finger and the thunderclaps that punctuated (and interrupted) our vows.  I am also glad beyond expression that I had with me a token of a marriage of such strength and durability that my grandfather’s last words to my grandmother as she died were simply “thank you.”

You can also see the blue ribbons that I had sewn around the hem of my dress; each carries a personal message from one of my bridesmaids (and a couple of other very dear friends).  One thing you can’t see is that both of my godmothers read prayers in the service.  It was a day of celebration of romantic love and commitment, but I was buoyed by the tangible presence of my close female friends and family.

Glory be to God for dappled things – Gerard Manley Hopkins (one of the poets I hear most frequently in my head).