Of course we had solar viewing glasses so we could look at it directly, but David also made a small pinhole camera and used it to cast an image onto this bit of card. This was at the height of the eclipse, when the moon was centered over the sun, leaving only the ring.
It was dark and quiet out during the eclipse. Most of the birds had settled down as though for the night. As the eclipse continued, one of the neighbor's roosters began to crow.
During the last eclipse, we were living in the casita and Kelly and Kevin had given us eclipse glasses so we could watch. We went out onto the lawn. The neighbor (who spoke to us maybe half a dozen times in the seventeen years we lived next door) came out onto the lawn with her granddaughter who was about three years old. We let them use our glasses to look at the eclipse and then after they gave them back, they continued to stand on the lawn. The little girl tugged at my shirt and said, "It's my turn again," so I gave her the glasses. We passed them back and forth like that, taking turns for awhile, until her grandmother called her in.
Dave's mother's birthday was at the end of September and he bought a digital photo frame for her. I helped him photograph some of the hard copy photos she left behind when she moved into the assisted living facility. This is one of those photos, of David.
He looks like he might have been a mischievous little monkey as a child, doesn't he?
(The bright spot on the upper left and the shadow in the lower right are artifacts of my using my phone to photograph a photograph.)
Photographing David's mother's photographs, many of which were not labeled, was sobering. The places and times and the people are lost to history--or soon will be as dementia progresses. In the collection was a very old timey photograph album, filled with black and white snapshots held in with black paper photo corners, the kind that you can hardly find anymore. None of the photos are labeled. David recognized a great uncle (along with two other great uncles he only knew by name but whom he never met) and he could guess at the identification of one or two other people, but that's it. David's mother isn't sure where the album came from-- she thinks it might have been her grandmother's-- but she recognized her uncles and mother and that was it. Who are all these strangers?
I pulled out a few of my own photographs, started labeling them with the date and place. I went through dozens that I took on a trip to Australia in 1999 when I was in college. I traveled with a small group of other students to so many different places, but the names of many of those places are gone from my memory as are the names of most of the other students. When the school part of the trip was over, David joined me and we traveled from Sydney to Melbourne by train (I have no photos of this) to visit his uncle and aunt who live in Melbourne. From there, we went to his uncle's vineyard in Berry's Creek. We stayed a week and then rented a car and drove the Great Ocean Road to Warrnambool.
On the trip, I saw kangaroos, tree kangaroos, rock wallabies, wombats, snakes, great orb weavers, green butt ants, every kind of bird you can imagine from emus to Willy wagtails, monitor lizards, sea turtles, giant clams, sharks, platypuses, flying foxes, everything. My photographs are mostly of landscapes and plants, with an occasional lizard or bird or spider thrown in. It's strange what we remember versus what photographs show us.
I have more to write about that, soon. And maybe more photographs, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment