Remembrance of Springs Past

I took this photo yesterday afternoon from one of Mom's upper bedrooms, which we call the Blue Room. She'd asked me to capture the incredible clouds of blossoms of her enormous Kwanzan cherry tree, which fill the windows with voluminous pink light, and make you feel you could step right out through the casement and bounce along on softness.

I hadn't even planned to post this image here, but I found myself staring at it for a good long while this morning. It is the kind of picture I like, because it has more to do with memory and emotion than with being a realistic recording of a time or place.

I was taken back to my bedroom in our house in the Oregon countryside, where I lived from age nine to twelve. Like this room, it was tucked under the eaves, with a peaked roof, and had three casement windows, with proper latches, that swung out wide. And like this room, it was blue and white.

A magic hideaway, a poet's garret.

But the most magical feature of that long ago haven was the large, old apple tree which grew right outside it. In April, blossoms spilled in over the sill, enveloping my springtime daydreams, and in autumn, I could sit on my white iron bed, lost in the wonderful book on my knees, a blue and white quilt tucked across my lap, and, thus ensconced, swing open the paned window to pluck a perfectly ripened apple.

Even at the time, I knew it was an enchanted place.

It was there that I practiced composition with my Brownie camera, and there where I typed the opening chapter of my first novel (a mystery! yet to be finished!) on an already-antique Corona. And also there where I spent too many days of one summer on my belly, my bottom smeared with calamine lotion after sitting in poison oak in the woods.

A much-loved place, where, wriggled under the covers on a rainy Saturday morning, I would hear Mom call up the stairs to me and my brothers next door, that there was no need to rush down, we could stay in bed and read all day if we wanted to.

Alas, that dear room is no more, and the darling red farmhouse it belonged to has been bulldozed to make way for a mega mansion in the now-trendy Portland suburb, which had been rural and peaceful and pastoral in our time there.

But I thought of my sweet sanctuary this morning, and how, while taking that photo yesterday, I had knelt upon the same charming iron bed, still covered with the same blue and white quilt. And all the intervening miles and years were swept away by that simple image. And there I was, face to face with my younger self. A continuity, I realized, of sorts. Precious and impervious to machinery and progress and the march of time.

Captured and held and dearer than gold.

And so, we take photographs.

xo
– g