"Outside My Window"

My mother is not a photographer.

Dad is the photographer. Dad can bend your ear for hours about composition, and focal length, and aperture openings, speak all sorts of photo-ese. Dad has taken some amazing, beautiful photographs. I can't say that I've ever even seen my mother with a camera in her hands.

The other day, the A.L.F. in Pouslbo, where Mom lived this year from January to June, called to tell me that they had a photograph Mom had taken while she was there. Apparently a bunch of residents took photos one day and the A.L.F. entered the photographs into the Kitsap County Fair.

Mom's photograph, they told me, was entitled "Outside My Window."

It won an Honorable Mention ribbon, they said.

Could I come and pick it up, they asked.

Sure, I said.

Today I finally drove over to pick up "Outside My Window."

They handed me a large yellow envelope. I thanked them, took the envelope, gave them a quick update on Mom and Dad (because they asked), then left.

It wasn't until I got into the car, that I actually opened the envelope.

I pulled the photo out. And what my brain initially saw was this blurry, almost impressionistic image of some pink and red rose bushes outside a paned window, an empty flower pot on the lower left corner of the window sill. It looked like a painting. But, as I stared longer, I recognized the view--the rose bushes just outside Mom's window in her room in Poulsbo.

The photo had a weird, haunting effect on me. I sat in the A.L.F. parking lot just staring at it. After several minutes, something in my head decided I needed to frame it. So I drove to WalMart, bought a frame for Mom'a photo, unwrapped the frame in the car, and fit the matted photo into the frame right there in the WalMart parking lot. I still couldn't stop staring at it.

The thing is........I've spent so many years, and so much energy trying to figure out what was going on inside my mother's head. And somehow, this single snapshot, one she took just a few months ago, most probably the last photo she'll ever take, somehow told me so much about her.

I look at the photo and I want to scream so many things straight into my keyboard. I want to take the photo to every person in my family, to every friend of mine who has patiently listened to me vent about how little I was ever able to understand my mother, and point to the photo emphatically and say, "See this? This photograph? THIS.........says so much about Mom!"

I mean....

It's so blurry!

But it's a picture of roses!

One stinkin' photograph.

One stinkin', blurry photograph........of roses.

Of blurry.........beautiful roses.

What Mom saw.......outside her window.