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For Lens Artists Challenge: Behind
Backgrounds add so much to a photo, either by contrast or by adding to the story. Sometimes just by their very blankness, they emphasize the main object. A vivid color may make the foreground object stand out. A pale color may direct ones eye to the object or person being presented. The background may be an interesting pattern or something going on that builds the mood or plot of the photo. A friend says some of these photos do not belong. If you agree, let me know which ones. It is my feeling that each has an object or being in the foreground, some being farther in the foreground than others. And in all cases, I feel there is an aspect of the background that meets the before-mentioned criteria.
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I always thought that at some point I would have children, but by the time I finally found the man I wanted have them with, I was thirty-eight, and he already had eight living children. Four of these children were under the age of eight when we met. When I married their dad, I married them, too. This poem was written at a time when, as inept as I was at entertaining small children in an L.A. condo, I still believed in a sort of magic wherein stepfamilies could connect to become become real families.
Connections
Your daughter breaks her arm and something breaks with it.
She becomes manageable.
Her laugh, softer now sometimes.
She loves writing with her other hand.
Her broken one grows fingernails for the first time
which we manicure once a week.
Sometimes, I drive home slower
on the nights I know we’re going to have the kids,
hoarding a few more minutes alone.
My key in the lock brings them, wanting games at once.
You, exhausted, irritable on the sofa,
wanting them yet wanting them gone.
In a movie, Mary Tyler Moore saying
she can’t love the son who needs her love too much.
Can’t love on demand?
Dirty fingernails, torn knees on Levis—
Our rag-a-muffins,
driven down to our city life
where they demand the mall.
Not the way I pictured it.
They call me Mom immediately after the wedding.
I scrub their fingernails,
put medicine on cold sores,
tell Jodie not to wear those torn-out pants to school anymore.
The other kids, I say, will talk—
what my mother would have said to me.
When I tell them at the office
about the homemade Easter decorations
hung on our refrigerator,
about the one that reads “to Mom,”
Jim says he prefers Elliott’s stories.
When I tell them that the littlest grabbed my knees
and hugged and said, “I just love you,”
the clever crowd around the copier groans.
I’m not a mother, they all understand,
and once a week, I barely get good practice in.
But when your daughter breaks her arm,
I try to find a spell to stick us all together—
paper, scissors, colored pens.
I say, “Try to keep the glue off the dining room table.”
I say, “Try not to drop the magic markers on the floor.”
“Take off your shoes when walking on the white sofa.”
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After I posted my original post, I found two other weather photos I had meant to post with it. They are huge hailstones that fell during a July family reunion at my nephew’s house in Des Moines, Iowa. The storm came up fast, scattering us into various shelters.
Originally, the photo below was the photo I thought I’d taken at that time, but checking out the dates, I discovered that I’d taken it on a beach in December. It looks like conjoined hailstones forming the shape of a heart, but I think that is unlikely. Any ideas of what it may be?
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 