A Widow’s Photographs and Dreams

I don’t have a lot of photos of my husband on display (or anywhere for that matter). Just three framed snapshots---one sits in the library, one on a chest of drawers in the hall and one is high on top of an antique medicine cabinet in my bedroom. Don loved photography and at social gatherings and on vacations he was always the person with a foot-long camera hanging around his neck thus he rarely appeared in the photos we had. Before we met I was into photography big time, took lots of classes and even knew how to develop my own film. (Boy, does that date me!) I loved taking photos of children and people who were unaware they were being photographed. Try doing that in this century and I’d get reported to the police for being creepy. And the few times in recent years when I’ve tried taking pictures of my toddler-age great-nieces and nephews they are so programed to taking selfies with their parents that the minute a camera appears they are posing with their tiny, fake smiles in place. I fear no one will ever take an arty-farty photo of a child again!

Don was a work-alcoholic with no other hobbies so he evolved into the chief photo documentarian of our travels through life. I had other hobbies, I collected them like some people collect stamps which, by the way, was one of my hobbies back in the day. Unfortunately, his pictures were all taken with a slide camera and you probably know what that means. Yup, they sit in boxes, unseen. Several years before he died I spent days sorting through the slides, picking out the best of the best intending to have them converted to a memory card to use in a photo-frame slide show. I set aside 200 slides and was planning to throw the rest out. However, my husband strongly nixed that idea. Mind you, no one had looked at those slides in decades but a wise woman knows where to pick her battles. So back down the basement the boxes went. Except for the best of the best that are still sitting in my closet with my good intentions to turn them into a viewable format all but forgotten. 

While sorting through the hundreds of slides it became apparent---as if I didn’t know already---that my husband also had favorite subjects in his view finder: landscapes, sunsets, flowers, wildlife and the dog. Rarely did he snap pictures of people. You can only look at so many photos of lovely landscapes, colorful sunsets and flowers, deer in fields and birds in the trees before they all start looking the same. And let me tell you about the many slides he took of our male dogs peeing! To me, if you’ve seen one dog peeing you’ve seen them all but Don was always looking for a humorous angle to the theme and sometimes, I have to admit, he found it. 

I’m reading My Mrs. Brown for book club and a passage had me reading it twice. It describes how Mrs. Brown takes a framed photo out of her bedside table drawer every night and displays it, then every morning she puts it back in the drawer. At first I thought, boy, is that ever weird! But then the author, William Norwich, went on to explain and I changed my mind. Mrs. Brown, he wrote, “was protecting her treasured photograph from time’s most corrosive element: forgetting.” He went on to describe how in a room full of furniture and knickknacks we get so used to seeing photographs among the other clutter that most of the time we don’t even see them anymore. “Her ritual of in and out from the drawer, morning and night, helps Mrs. Brown keep her greatest treasure alive...” I sure recognize the truth in that logic…not so much as a widow who has a few photos of Don on display but because the passage brought echoes back around of something Don often said about fixing broken things around a house. “If you let something go for more than two weeks,” he’d say, “you don’t see it anymore and it doesn’t get fixed until you’re getting ready to have a party or move.”

That book passage had me thinking that maybe I should adopt that in and out of the drawer each morning and night routine with a photo of Don. It’s a sweet tradition, isn’t it. But then I discarded the idea because Don comes to me in my dreams so often I couldn’t forget him if I tried. Last night he and I got separated at a huge flea market and I couldn’t find his cell phone number in my phone. He and I have been getting lost or separated in my dreams so damned often lately and I wake up with a jolt and sometimes I can't fall back to sleep. I’m amazed at how many different ways during REM sleep my bran finds to keep us separated. But that begs the question, which is the real me? My nighttime self who apparently still suffers from separation anxiety or my daytime self who likes to believe she's a well-adjusted woman? ©

The photo above, was taken by Don. That poodle could always find 'creative places' to pee.

P.S. If you read my last blog entry you might like to know that I finally got two hummingbirds to come out of the pines and down to my feeder!