Jan 24,, 2015

I woke up with a strange feeling of having missed something. When I opened my eyes, my bedroom was bright and shadowless and the sky was white. Had the sun come up?  Is that what I missed?

At 3:30 in the morning, the sun wasn’t even nearing the horizon. It was the moon that was lighting everything up, making a low cloud cover glow.  Snow had fallen, covering everything with a couple inches of virginal white which softened corners and tree branches and made the shrubs in the garden look like like huge flowers. It was pure Hollywood.

Kimo, the little cat, gets what she wants. She pushes stuff off shelves and the sound of glass shattering would propel me out of bed to let her out. I lost a few bottles of cologne this way until I got smart and kitty-proofed the place, setting only unbreakables where she might reach them. The sound still gets me up because she’s relentless, and I’m pretty sure she’d figure out how to open the kitchen cupboards and shove glasses into the sink.

But this morning, she hadn’t done any damage. She only pushed at the covers till she found me and then stared at the side of face until I opened my eyes so I could share what she had already discovered. The world was beautiful.

Lately, I’ve been a little unhappy, although not unhappy enough to declare myself depressed.  Just disappointed in the way the days go. Not much happening, and when I get home, there’s nothing to do.  Sometimes I even make ridiculous lists of things I could do to fill the hours: take tap dance lessons, learn to weave – you know, get an actual loom – buy a keyboard and play the piano again.  None of this takes place, however.

What I don’t want to do, and it takes a great deal of will power not to do it, is what Mother did the last few years before she died.  She had boxes of old photographs and she emptied them out on the kitchen table and sorted through them for hours. Remembering her girlhood, mostly, before she married dad, before my brother and I came along.  I thought it was the saddest thing I had ever seen, those little piles of black&white photos, some with their edges curling up, reminding Mother that she was once young and pretty and laughing a lot.

I have a photos of my own, of course. Scrapbooks in the attic, and collages of  dozens of happy photos, framed. I used to have them on the wall of my office at home because they made me happy, but finally I took them down and put them in the basement. Those good times were too long ago, and I am not that girl any more. I need new photographs.

We all need new photographs., but when I rolled over this morning – or more accurately at 3:30AM, which frankly, I don’t consider morning – the silent beauty of the snow and the sky was, for the moment, all the photograph I needed. For a quiet moment or two, I wasn’t pressured by a need to do something and take a picture of it. I got up and walked around the house, looking out all the windows, and then I went back to bed.

And I was happy.