When all our colors fade to white and night is day and day is night, and I am you and you are me, erased for perpetuity, when spectral is our whole domain, when death obtrudes, what will remain?
When death obtrudes, what will remain? When spectral is our whole domain, and all our colors fade to white, when night is day and day is night, we will be one—our you and me erased for perpetuity.
“That” picture in the wheelbarrow. I look shocked at being so posed.
Patti and I under the rose trellis.
One of the first photos of me that I have, ten months old
My sister Patti’s horse, passed down to me.
My fifth birthday party.
When I was little, life seemed like one long summer day,
With our Xmas dolls, in Betty’s green checked bedroom.
Arty shot.
Patti’s birthday. Probably her seventh.
First day of school.
Fishing with dad and my sisters.
Patti’s first formal occasion
Patti and Karen, always the clowns.
Patti’s twelfth (?) costume birthday party. I was Alice in Wonderland.
Photo shoot. Two years old? Again, most likely posed by Betty.
Age one plus. Caught unaware.
Merry-go-Round
Patti, her friend and I on the schoolground slides across the street from our house.
The smell of grass. Sister outfits.
Learning to ride a tricycle.
Ten months old, in front of our “new” house.
Patti, Me, Patty Peck
Me with “my” dog. It really belonged to our neighbors.
Neighborhood play
Floating around in innertubes?.
1949
Fooling around in costume
Family Christmas–Grandma, Dad and me.
My favorite shot of my mom and me
Click on the photos to enlarge and read captions.
Although the subject of these photos seems to be mainly me, the actual subject is the photographer. I was just her compliant model..These are all photos taken by my sister Betty Jo, who was eleven years older than me. Her other frequent subject was my sister Patti, four years older than me. Since the photos seem to start when I was about ten or eleven months old, I think perhaps Betty Jo must have received a camera for her birthday the year she turned eleven. It was another time when cellphones had not been invented and even cameras were rare. I remember a black box camera and wonder if that was hers or if by then there was a newer model. Whatever the camera, she was a natural in choosing and composing shots. Betty passed away yesterday, Nov. 5, 2021, and these pictures and the following poem are my tribute to her.
My Sister’s Camera
Videos and photos are doorways to the past. Without these visual triggers, how long would memory last? The emphasis of daily life infringes on what’s done. Memories of childhood? I fear I would have none if my sister’s camera had not been there to snatch every special moment that she was there to catch.
Her photos chronicled our lives, forestalling our forgetting, capturing tranquility or happiness or fretting. The fragrant past floods out from them in scents I now recall: new-cut grass and wheat and dust. That tiny baby doll I carried everywhere with me until its rubber rotted. That smell of crumbling rubber with which I was besotted.
The cherry trees and trellis, those friends far in the past The memories of dress-up that were never sure to last without my sister catching them with her inquisitive eye. She watched with care and caught them, never knowing then that I would chart my childhood through her photos—life tumultuous or calm caught there in the camera she cushioned in her palm and clicked into the future with just one lowered finger, insuring that my fleeting past was sure to always linger.
The pictures of her childhood were few and far between, but the pictures that she took of us when she was a teen form a history of our pasts so memories won’t fade. I wish that I had told her the difference she made. Why do we wait too late to take time for these reflections that might have helped us to express our genuine affections?
The last time that I saw her, months ago, so little there. My lips upon her dry cheek, my fingers in her hair. Conversing with her empty eyes, my attempts to reconnect when the time was past that she was able to reflect on her memories of taking them. What caused her action bold to put me in the wheelbarrow when I was ten months old and snap that classic picture. Was her camera new that day, a present on her birthday, the 23rd of May?
Did she take other photos that I have never seen? Besides her younger sisters, what subjects filled her screen? We were her willing models, accustomed to the orders of an older sister who adjusted hems and borders to frame the perfect photo that survives to this day to remind us of the sister who has quietly slipped away.
In contrast, this is the only photo I have of my sister Betty as a child. Without someone like herself to take them, she was more rarely depicted in photographs.
This is one of my favorite photos of my sister Betty, clearing out
her dorm room in college to come home for the summer.
My sister Betty Dykstra Wilcox passed away early this morning, November 5, 2021. Eight years ago, at the beginning of her battle with Alzheimer’s, I wrote this poem about a visit Forgottenman and I made to her house to try to alter it a bit to enable her to live independently for as long as possible. He scrubbed pots and pans and organized the kitchen while I sorted out and labeled bedroom drawers on the outside to indicate contents. When she grew distressed over our sorting out of items in the upstairs storage room, he whisked her off for smash burgers and she returned happy.
I will always be grateful for these last warm memories of my sister before she slipped completely into the clutches of Alzheimer’s. Every night, we three sat on the front steps. Forgottenman played his guitar and sang and the little girls from across the street would come running to sit in the grass and listen. One night their folks joined them and another night when we were in the backyard playing croquet with Betty, one of the little girls went into Betty’s house, got his guitar and brought it out to the backyard requesting that he play!
Then one night when we came in from the front yard, she wandered into the music room and we heard strains of piano music coming from her piano. It was the last time I ever heard her play, and this is the poem that was the result:
When My Sister Plays the Piano
The first notes, beautiful and true, float like a memory through the air. In the week I’ve been here in her house with her, she has not played the piano and so I thought her music was gone like her memory of what day it is or whether I am her sister, her daughter or an unknown visitor.
Yet on this morning after her 76th birthday celebration, music slips like magic from the keys: song after song from “Fur Elise” to a sweet ballad I don’t know the name of— sure and correct at first, then with a heartfelt emotion we had both forgotten.
“Slow Boat to China,” “Paper Doll”— song after song expressed in an unfaltering language— some synchronicity of mind and hand her brain has opened the door to.
While I listen, time stands still for me as it has for her so often in the past few years as yesterday and today shuffle together to crowd out all consideration of future fears.
For ten minutes or more, she segues from melody to melody with no wrong note. Then “Ebb Tide,” a song she has played from memory so many times, dies after twenty-four notes. Like a gift held out and snatched away, I yearn for it, pray she’ll remember.
After an uncharted caesura, her music streams out again, sweet and sure, for a staff or two— the sheet music giving her a guide her brain so often can’t. But after a longer pause, I know it is lost like the thread of so many conversations–– a hiccup of memory, folding itself away.
“What a Friend We Have in Jesus” chimes out like the tolling of a bell. The wisp of the old hymn, two phrases only— before it, too, fades.
That sudden muffled sound. Is it a songbook displaced from its stand as she searches for another, or the lid of the piano quietly closing on yet another partial memory?
R.I.P. Betty. Next July at the town reunion in Murdo, the town we grew up in, we’ll have a memorial for her and bury her ashes in the family plot. xoox
Forgottenman just sent me a video of Betty he took when he joined us for Thanksgiving right after we first met in person. In the first part, she is just inventing a song, but afterwards, I suggest she play “Ebb Tide.” She’s not able to play it on the little keyboard but she does play “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” which she always played because it was one of my father’s favorites. It is pure coincidence that both of these songs are mentioned in the poem. A nice synchronicity.
Rip up your notebook and throw it away. At heart, you know you have nothing to say. The cadre of writers who came on before you wrote legions of words guaranteed not to bore you. They composed solid volumes of bountiful wit. Their number of sales will verify it. The drivel you write is mere uninspired lore, so better you read what they wrote than write more.
This variety of hibiscus grows into a huge tree covered with these glorious blooms. These photos were taken on my walk along the malecon this evening, but I think they deserve their own separate post.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 