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February Photo A Day

I save pretty things. Ribbons. Buttons. Flowers. They come from gifts that have been given to me where care has been taken in the wrapping. I always think I'll use the silken pieces of others generosity to gift my own presents. But they sit together in tangles with the yarn and thread and knitting needles, the tools of all the abandoned projects that looked more beautiful when they lived inside my head. 

Still, I save them, for a someday. 

Dinner

February Photo A Day

Since I've been photographing every move Little O makes these days, I haven't been photographing my dinners as often as I used to photograph them. Tyler, however, still busts out the complicated recipes. We just eat them very quickly in between screaming fits or feedings or diaper changes.

We ate this lobster dinner on New Year's Eve, before the little one came. We cooked the live lobsters ourselves. We put one lobster in the pot, placed the lid on top, and just when I was about to turn away...the pot moved. That was a precarious moment.

It all turned out okay.

I apologize to all my vegetarian friends.

10am

February Photo A Day

10am. We dream of spring. 

A Stranger

February Photo A Day

These two children are not strangers to me but I caught them one day in matching blue plaid, their bare feet against wood and dirt, and there was something magical about the conversation that happened, how it overcame the fence that separated them and the green that blocked the way.

Hands

February Photo A Day

Well, I posted baby feet, so it seems only right that I post baby hands today. 

And a repost of something I wrote a few years ago to go with the theme of hands. 

Sunday, April 1, 2012

I found peach blossoms at the market.  I bought them too early, at the beginning of a morning full of errands.  So I carried the branches through the neighborhood, snuck them through crowded sidewalks.  They brushed past boarded construction sites and I raised them to avoid strollers, street lamps, stray passersby. 

The hunchbacked butcher, who I love, who moves slow and steady behind the counter lugging meat in his blood-stained coat, asked me if I had brought them for him. I held them out and he laughed and told me he has his own tree in the yard, how beautiful it is, though he worries about the cold snap, how many blooms he'll lose.

Later, we rode our bicycles through Williamsburg, to Greenpoint, and an endless string of cars lined the streets to Steiner Studios.  An open trunk revealed giant sacks of potatoes and carrots.  Men in suits, with wide-brimmed hats and payot, slung them over their shoulders and moved through the procession to an event we wondered about, one we could not possibly know.

As I pedaled, I saw many hands clutch leafy palms as church let out. I was reminded of Sundays as a little girl, sitting restlessly in wooden pews. I'd kick my feet against the sturdy pew in front of me, snatch a bundle of palms when they came my way. 

My mother, a talented knitter, would effortlessly weave them together in delicate designs. I'd bend and twist and curve my palms and it frustrated me that they never looked like hers.

Do it to mine too, I'd pout.  And she'd take them from me in the car on the way home, braid them the way she braided my hair.  I'd sit in the backseat and she'd hand them back to me, something newer than what they were, the green ends dangling like delicate ribbons of silk.

Words

More of February Photo A Day.

As far as the theme of words, this is what I think it's like to be a writer. To make sense of letters and words. To arrange them. To fit them where they don't belong. To squeeze them into a space. To eek them out in the dark when no one else is looking. To help them find their places. 

View Today

It's been a little over three weeks since we welcomed Little O (as he shall be named) to the world and things have been going well.  There have been many sleepless nights but it's an adventure each day. We learn about one another. I figure out how to add mother to the roles I've assumed throughout my life.

I love to hold him in my arms. I love to watch him sleep. I like to dress him -- a real life doll, squirming, squeaking, as I fit a tiny arm through a sleeve.  Right now, I am simply amazed at the way he moves from sleep to waking and reverse. Then I wonder what he might see when he is awake, wide-eyed and staring out into our world. His eyes are big and, right now, blue, and I like to watch them look. I try not to think too much of what's to come but it's hard not to wonder who he will be.

This month, I'm going to attempt the February Photo A Day Challenge which I discovered, during a late-night, bleary-eyed feeding. I thought it might be a low-stress way to be on the blog a bit and work creatively in small patches of time.

I missed the first day but I have a few photos that I believe fit that theme of a view today.  I love the foot bridge at the end of our street.  It takes us over the highway to the subway, to our neighborhood of shops and restaurants and tree-lined streets and stoops.

To me, this is what it looks like to live where I live, on the waterfront. If I were to close my eyes and imagine our neighborhood, these are the first structures I think about, the movement of shipping containers all along our ribbon of street.