Sarah's Lens

Last summer Sarah came to visit and when she left, I was changed forever.

Sarah was 15 years old last summer and came to us, all flushed and full of giggles, to play and sight see on the first California trip of her life. I am reaching way, way back into my brain to access the memory of the days that I was 15 and I wonder if I had that kind of spunk and spirit back then. I am told I did, but these days I get confused between the legends and the truth. And, well, 15 was another life ago.

When I was 15 years old, I was living in East Tennessee on a parcel of farmland which my father had purchased to whisk us away from suburban life. I thought it was punishment to be 45 minutes from a mall or a McDonald's and to be confined in a place so remote you could sing at the top of your lungs and the only creatures to hear you were grazing cows, pecking chickens and lazy horses. Dad had excavated a swimming hole at the bottom of the hill on our rolling acreage and he stocked it with fish. He added a pier to fish from and a sandy "beach" (for effect, the way he did everything). We had a red barn which never housed the horses ... only a ping pong table and some hay, I think. It was sticky-hot in the summer and tiny insects would swarm around in circles in the high grassy areas. And in the summertime, Sarah's dad and his sister, Marjorie, would come to dunk and splash in that pond with the disgustingly slimy bottom made of mud. I have taken pictures of this place with the eyes of my memory and a few very poor quality photographs. They are what remains to mark the spot.

Those muggy summers all came and went and so did a few decades. Along came marriage and mortgages and children and scary sadness all layered on top of each other like some kind of inedible lasagna. Hidden inside those drippy layers were the remnants of all those adolescent summers and the things worth keeping ... that is, until Sarah came to visit.

When your child meets the child of your friends from childhood it is a miracle of sorts. They enforce the need to go back in time and dig into the pile of goo, to clean up and salvage to find the "keepers".

When Sarah came off the plane, hidden in her luggage was the Miracle Lens. In the process of pulling back the curtains to show her California coastlines and tourist haunts, I would stop and look around to see Sarah lagging behind, contorting herself into the strangest poses to snap photographs of things I didn't see and probably never would have cared to capture. She told me this was called "macro photography" and that she loved zooming in to the most infinitesimal details -- a drop of rain on a blade of grass, the wings of an insect, eye lashes, table settings, flooring patterns... and with each discovery she shared by way of the pictures she snapped, I was jarred out of my oblivious trance so that I could really "see" again all the little things right here, right now, which I was missing as I sped up and down the freeway.

Sarah came to town just in time for me. Whatever she brought into my life was contagious. I find myself "doing a Sarah" almost every day now ... stopping to see and explore something normal in the context of my every day traffic patterns. The other day, when I was doing a "Sarah" I actually noticed Zoe sitting in a stream of sunlight and it inspired me to think and blog about it. She tutored me to "see" the pictures and images that flash in front of me every single minute as a diving board which allow me to feel again.

In the year that has passed since Sarah was here, we had our first family wedding and along with it came some very remarkable milestones. But, I don't think I missed a thing, not a single important memory. I have a very full mental website (still clicking away), now capturing the look on my very happy son's face, their casual smiles, her strands of hair blowing in the breeze at the beach, sandy feet, half sipped cups of take out coffee, my husband's hard working hands, my daughter's laugh ... and so on, and so on...

Sarah was like a little muse that dropped in from the sky and sprinkled some kind of potion on all of us that suddenly made life come alive, look brighter, taste sweeter. She probably has absolutely no idea that she inspired a gallery of beautiful things that now travel on a daily exhibition tour with me as I pack up my briefcase and change the view from mother to wife to professional every day ... click, click, click goes my own lens.

Thank you, Sarah.