This summer night is all sticky with frozen grapes, and I’m rummaging through volumes of old family photographs. Look at me. I used to be so small that I could crawl underneath the chairs in the kitchen. At that age, when the bread I ate was all fluffy and pale with nutritionlessness, I pretended to be a puppy and the chair was... actually probably just a chair to me. But I definitely believed that I was puppy.
There are people in these photographs that I don’t recognize. And because my context was born long after the camera first blinked, I have no notion of theirs. Was the graying woman in the green dress a teacher at sunday school? Or maybe she was a flight nurse? And why did everyone think bellbottoms were such a great idea?
Will my grandkids look at a photo of my mother kneeling bloody next to a red igloo cooler and know that she put up a hell of a fight against a twenty four pound catfish? Or will they assume her battle was lost that day? Catfish didn’t always used to grow that large, you know. Pollution hooked itself heavy onto the rod and dragged her knee by scraping knee across the weather eroded pier. We joked that she didn’t catch the fish, but that it was the other way around.
But my grandkids will only know this if I take the time to write it all down. I think we forget that sometimes. Photos can be wings, but without the vigor of words behind them they’re just the desiccated bodies of photobleached moths resting listless on my windowsill.
