Flashes
For her tenth birthday she received a camera, the first of many over the years. It was an inexpensive thing with limited zoom and focus abilities, but more than adequate to learn on. She took photos of whatever struck her fancy: insects in the garden, the sleeping forms of her siblings, a trickle of rain escaping from the storm gutters. With her allowance money she paid for prints at the local photomat.
Other machines came, more expensive machines with interchangeable lenses and sturdier components. By the end of high school she had set up a darkroom in a corner of the basement. For the rest of her life she was never without a camera close at hand.
Hers was not a wealthy family, but they still had some means, and took frequent holidays. Long drives upstate. Plane trips to tropical islands. Train rides across country. She took hundreds of photographs on these trips, her lenses pressed against the glass.
Her family found these images quixotic and puzzling: automobiles reduced to colored smears, blurred vegetation, streaks of light flaring off the wing of an airplane. The world registered as indistinct streaks.
She took them for reasons she knew, but could never articulate: that life flashed by in tiny moments, while you rushed towards a destination, and it was imperative to capture them. Or they’d begone forever, unrecognized and unmourned.
