Day 169

Another Canobie Lake face.

I didn't run today because I had to spend the day at school, doing last orders, cleanup, etc.    But I did go for a fairly long walk with the black dog, quite early this morning. 

Molly rushed off ahead of me along the path into the forest, running to the ball tree where she waits trembling with anticipation.  I walked more slowly, when suddenly I felt someone watching me.

Looking in the direction from which I could feel the stare emanating, I saw a young doe, about 25 feet away from me, stock-still, gazing at me, trying to determine how much of a threat I was.  She had large velvet ears trained on the air like satellite dishes, a narrow pretty face, large brown eyes scrutinizing me.  Standing on her silent legs, ready, alert, waiting. 

Eventually I decided to get my camera out to take a photograph, but she was too shy for that and, turning, she moved off unhurriedly, but out of range before I could get the camera ready.  And I thought how important it is to live in the moment, sometimes NOT to record it.  Taking photographs means that you are always looking at everything as a possible subject.  I had thought how I would show Tim how close the animal had been to me.  I had thought how beautiful she would look in the photograph, through the green morning leaves.  I thought how amazing it would have been if she had been a wild horse instead of a deer.  Horses are definitely more mysteriously beautiful than deer.  But deer remind me a bit of horses, so skittish and delicately powerful.  Nevertheless, I spoiled it somehow, spoiled my perception of the experience.

Like other technological accessories that we are hooked up to at any given moment of the day, cameras have taken over our lives as well.  The new generation is the most photographed generation ever, because cameras are relatively cheap.  Also, it is so easy to take a million pictures, you don't have to think about the cost of film or developing, you just upload them to your computer and there you go!  So on every computer is a glut of images which are bad, blurred, poor in composition, over-exposed, under-exposed.  All taking up space on our hard drives, and taking up space in our heads too.  And it takes far too much time to go patiently through them and delete the majority, just keep the beauties.

No longer do we have carefully wrought photograph albums with dates and captions under images to pore over on a rainy Saturday afternoon, Two little girls sharing a towel, remembering beach days feeding the rockpool fish with crushed periwinkles, Cousins at the swimming pool, and the feeling of  the chlorinated water in the bright sunny swimming-pool of the cousins, where we swam underwater and tried to understand the garbled words the water made for our mouths and ears.  Pop and Granny at Christmas, and I am back at 10 Forest Drive, hot and bothered adult women in the kitchen, children playing french cricket in the back garden, even Pop joining in on occasion, with his shy smile.  And great aunts and uncles that we barely knew, just saw in photographs, although one, Auntie Phyllis, was a character alright, changing her name by deed poll to her lover's surname when his wife would not divorce him.  They lived happily together for years and years, at a time when that was definitely frowned upon.   

One such photograph I have pored over is this one.  My parents before they were even married, just two beautiful young people brought together by the Second World War.  With their whole 64 years of marriage ahead of them, a lifetime.

My dad was always touching my mother, hugging her, putting his arm around her, even nabbing a quick feel of her breast.  In just about every picture that we have of them together, they are close, drawn in to one another.  He loved her in a very physical way, right up until she died.