A Photograph

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

Ben Hecht

The box on my lap is filled with old photographs: my mother as a mischievous toddler, another of her playing the piano as a young woman, her dark hair swept back from her face and tied with a white silk ribbon. There are pictures of my grandmother on her wedding day, in a pale skirt and jacket, my grandfather handsome in a dark suit. The photograph is sepia-coloured, blurred with age, and I wonder what colour she wore, whether the blooms she held were pink or white.

I’ve been going through photos and memorabilia, pieces of our family history caught in greeting cards, certificates, letters and on film. Here I am, hand-in-hand with my brother, two tiny figures standing on a bridge under tall pines. And here is a school photograph of me smiling, with the crooked front teeth my father said looked like tombstones.

Some time ago, I came across a picture of myself, at about five years old, talking to my father’s Grandmother Lucy. It’s a beautiful candid shot, full of light and shadow. Today’s poem is a reflection on that photo.

Great Granny Lucy and I
A photograph taken by my father

We sit together on Gran’s old ball and claw 
stinkwood couch, the Welsh dresser behind us, 
with its Royal Doulton crockery, its carved doors.

Sunlight falls across the half of my little-girl face
turned towards hers, the other half dimmed in shadow. 
I am mid-thought, about to speak, the fingers
of my left hand count on those of my right.
A book lies open on my lap. 

Great Granny Lucy listens, soft silver hair swept back 
From her face with a black Alice band. She smiles, attentive,
crow’s feet wreathing the corners of her eyes. 
A saucer rests, tilted, in her left hand, the cup in her right. 
She is thin, reed-like, beautiful.

I have no memory of our conversation,
or of this meeting, so I am glad of this picture.
And it comes to me, suddenly, that I am looking at myself 
through my father’s eyes. 

Those last two lines came as a surprise. I discovered the thought as I wrote them, and realised that there were three people present in that photograph, though only two are visible. And now, as I look through images, I too am an unseen presence, looking at the subjects through my eyes, through the lens of the stories I've been told about them, or the ones I've told myself. Some images challenge those stories, open me up to other ways of seeing. The past, in one sense, is not fixed. It shifts and shimmers in the narratives left behind, in the tenuous link between an event and what we remember of it, between the memory and the telling. 

I feel a sadness in knowing that some gaps cannot be filled. What did my great grandmother's voice sound like, and what was her favourite colour? What were the names of my grandmother's horses, and what did she and her father talk about as they walked the fields of her childhood farm? When did my father first fall in love with mountains? I'll never know.

With wishes for a beautiful week, 
Carri.