Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Snapshots in My Memory


It used to be a photographer’s worst nightmare, back before everyone carried a cell phone and every cell phone included a camera. That perfect, once-in-a-lifetime picture looms before you—and you’ve left your camera at home.

The first time this happened to me, I couldn’t have been more than 10 years old. My parents had given me their old Brownie box camera (Anyone else remember these?), and I’d taken some pictures I’m proud of to this day. But this particular day my camera was sitting at home on a shelf.

The spring had been, not unlike most Illinois springs, rather erratic, with cold temperatures giving way to warm temperatures in early March, then reverting to cold temperatures and snow flurries later in the month. As I was walking home from school, I passed an ancient tree with gnarled roots radiating in all directions. The wind suddenly picked up and whirled a mix of snow and brown leaves out from between two of them to reveal, hidden among the remaining leaves and snow, a small clump of violets in bloom.

I could do nothing but try to remember it—like a snapshot in my memory.

Several years later, I was in a car with my parents, riding through the countryside between Flora and Olney in Southern Illinois, and there was the perfect sliver of a moon high in the sky long before sunset, like a fleck of gold floating in a turquoise eye—a snapshot in my memory.

Nearly grown, I was on horseback in the Fox River bottoms near Olney. It’s a wild area. Parts of it look like humankind has never walked there. But most of it is laced with trails like the one I rode this warm autumn day, and small pockets of crops are planted in open places to take advantage of the rich, loamy soil. I was riding past one of these when a red-winged blackbird glided down onto a full, golden head of wheat and balanced there, wings outstretched, for long seconds—a snapshot in my memory.

When I was a young mother living in the Kiamichi Mountains of Southeastern Oklahoma, I woke one night to find my bedroom glowing with silvery light. I rolled over and peeked out the window to find a full moon high in a sky covered with puffy clouds that looked like lily pads. They were reflecting the moon’s light so completely that the dirt road leading to our house looked like a stream of molten silver—a snapshot in my memory.

I was visiting my sister on the plains of Nebraska one summer when her husband called from the airbase to tell us to go to shelter because a severe storm was on the way. As we left her mobile home, I looked across the prairie to see a perfect anvil-shaped cloud preceding the storm front, grumbling thunder and dropping bolts of lightning as it approached—a snapshot in my memory.

My kids grew up in a little town south of Champaign, Illinois. I used to take evening walks past a small, picturesque grove. One evening, mist curled around the trunks of the trees and the air was filled with fireflies. Crouched in the mist, surrounded by fireflies, was a wild rabbit—still as death and poised to flee—a snapshot in my memory.

I’ve seen double and triple rainbows—even an upside-down rainbow once. I didn’t have my camera. I’ve seen sundogs and “the new moon hanging from a star,” and I didn’t have my camera. I’ve seen comets that swept the sky—one with a double tail—and I didn’t have my camera. I’ve seen brilliant sunsets, fiery dawns, bursts of lightning in pink and green that came down from the clouds and up from the earth and met in the middle—and I didn’t have my camera.

All just snapshots in my memory--until now. Now you have those snapshots, too.



21 comments:

  1. this is a marvelous piece of writing, you have such talent and have managed to share your own mental images with me so that I feel I have also seen them.

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  2. I hate when a moment like that presents itself and you don't have a camera handy. Fortunately I always have my phone and 9 times out of 10 I get better pictures from it than I get from my camera. One of these days I will get a better camera, but until then my phone works wonders.

    Kathy
    http://gigglingtruckerswife.blogspot.com

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    1. I hate the pix I get on my phone and my iPad. But when I don't have my DSLR with me, I carry a small point&shoot that does an amazing job. Most of the pix on my photo blog were taken with it.

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  3. Angela ... I really enjoyed reading this :) I too take snapshots and they are as real today as the day that I snapped them.

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  4. Thank you for sharing them. They are just as precious and indelible as prose as would the photos have been, maybe more.

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  5. I'm with Jo, this is a lovely post Angela and I think snapshots in memory might mean the most.

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    1. Thank you, Kelly. I agree, and I also think that whether the snapshots are on paper or in one's memory, they get more precious as time passes.

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  6. When I was little, I sometimes wished God would give me the ability to take photos by just blinking my eyes and the picture would come out of my ears!

    I enjoyed this post. :)

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  7. Beautiful "snapshot" moments that you shared with us Angela. I love rainbows, and the full moon. One night when my son and I were on our way back to our upstairs apartment, I paused in the driveway, for what seemed to be a very long time, awestruck by what I saw. The full moon was larger than life in the Colorado sky, and beside it was a double rainbow. It was so brightly coloured it looked like someone had painted it into the sky... no camera... but I will never forget the beauty nature shared with me that night (or the car that eventually honked behind me to get me to move along).

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    1. The moon and stars in Colorado are so much more vivid than they are in Illinois. Even this year, with humidity like a desert, our skies aren't as brilliant. I notice it every time I visit my daughter. She lives at about 8,000 feet, and the sky is just amazing. Never seen a rainbow at night there tho.

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  8. Wonderfully done! I'm glad I posted mine before I read any this week or I'd feel like a big copycat. :O)

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    1. Great minds think alike. : - ) I do notice though that your snapshots have to do with interpersonal relationships while mine are all images of nature. Think a psychiatrist would make something of that?

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  9. I can relate to these memory snapshots. Although I can picture my childhood bedroom well, I don't think I ever took a picture of it in the many years when I lived there. The new owners of my parents' house have ripped up the room and turned it into a bathroom.

    http://joycelansky.blogspot.com

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    1. I've missed so many. I don't have pix of any of my favorite cars: the Dodge Omni O24, the first "sporty" car I owned; the Eagle Talon that would go from 65 to 95 while passing if I wasn't really careful; the candy apple red Mitsubishi Eclipse that was just cute as heck; my first "senior citizen car," the Lincoln Mark VIII. Kind of sad, really.

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  10. wow..i think the snow and violets are still with me!!!!!! :0)
    LOVED THIS

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    1. Thank you, ah...drc? Honeydew? Well, thank you, anyway. : - ) Some of my snapshots have spawned poetry, and that's one of them. It's called Violets in Winter (big surprise, huh?) and I think it might be on my blog somewhere.

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  11. What an amazing piece of writing. Really enjoyed reading it. Very different and precious.

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    1. Thank you. I'm always happy when someone enjoys my writing. That's what keeps me working. : - )

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