Some days I feel like a roving reporter. And today I even had my film camera on hand. These sweet little houses on Libbie Avenue are destined for tear down to make room for something—most likely far less adorable. As workers marked the utility lines for digging and demolition, I pulled over to take pictures. For half an hour, I was transported back in time to the neighborhood where I grew up in my own tiny house. A neighborhood where we played Red Light, Green Light and Mother May I or Hot Potato until the summer sun went down or the mosquitoes threatened to eat us alive. A neighborhood where we road bikes in the street and turned the swing set into a fairy castle. I’m not nostalgic for old times, just happy to have lived them.
I might make a strawberry rhubarb upside down cake. I cut out a recipe from a Martha Stewart magazine from 2005 (picked up from the library book sale for free). Or maybe I’ll make a fruit crisp, like this one from Cup of Jo. I’ve made peace with sugar and dessert sounds good. My recovery from disordered eating has been a long journey and I trust that my body can handle eating sweet foods. Eating is pleasurable and joyful once again.
I’ve checked out the book from the library at least six times. Blind Spot by Teju Cole. The first few times, I think I only looked at the pictures. But these last few times, I’ve read the paragraphs that accompany each photograph, too. This book is almost an instruction manual for the art of seeing, and I love it more with each read.
Your progress is not a line, direct or winding, from one point to another, but a flickering series of scenes. A street is not only its tarred surface, the buildings alongside it, the cars fast or slow, the people around you. It is also the way those things relate to one another, the way they combine and recombine. As some elements slip out of view, new ones become visible: you are moving, slowly, and in the middle of this multi-dimensional movement you must decide when to press the shutter, decide which of these rapidly refreshing instants is more interesting than the others around it. A second before, it has not yet arrived. A second later, it is irretrievably gone. —Teju Cole, Blind Spot
I can’t decide if I am terribly naive or maybe just plain old arrogant. For most of my fifties, I felt fairly invincible. Fit, active, healthy. Aging was, in my mind, something that happened to other people. Not me. But passing through the pandemic, I rolled into my sixties, and ran smack dab into my own mortality. On the day that I took these pictures I had a routine appointment with my doctor. Weight and blood pressure both creeping up. The physician was kind . . . using words like post-menopausal and family history and doing the best you can. She gave tips like keeping a food diary and weighing myself daily— things I’ve worked hard to leave behind. Keep moving, she said. I explained my photo walks and the miles I cover, one foot before the other. For a little while, I felt sorry for myself. I slipped back into old ways, thinking I have not done enough. Cue worry and self-criticism and pressure. But the doctor does not know me. She doesn’t know how hard I have worked to stop trying to fix myself from the outside in. She doesn’t know that there are things more important than trying to be perfect (or have the perfect BMI score). A ride in the country, a day trip to take pictures, and I am restored. With my camera in hand, I am reassured that I am on the right path for me. I’ve spent a lifetime accommodating others and in the process, I’ve given away so much of myself, it sometimes feels as though there is nothing of me left. Or maybe that sense of self just never really developed at all. It’s hard to know yourself when you grow up seeking safety by trying to please others. Now is the time to let my light shine.