a moment in the day: nuts

Stephen's standing at the kitchen window looking out.

"Do you see it?" he asks. "Here on the gate and then over there on the fence?"

"What?" I come over.

"The piles of walnut shells from where the squirrels have been eating them."

I've been seeing them do that a lot lately. Sitting on their ledges, brown balls of fluff with their tails in jaunty question marks, gnawing at nuts over their little piles of refuse.  They seem industrious eaters at this time of year. Are they fattening up for winter? Or am I just looking forward to fall?

Me: "I don't see them."

Stephen, annoyed: "I keep having to brush the stuff off. They're leaving it everywhere."

Me, bemused: "You know that's just what squirrels do naturally."

Stephen: "It's gross."

I sidle in closer to him and now I see them. One on the low wooden top of the gate, and two more over there on the fence that separates our yard from our neighbor's. Funny, little piles of shell, almost perfectly shaped, as if art directed by tiny squirrel hands. The way our world is shared with these small beings gives me a happy, little pang in my chest.

Me: "Cute!"

Stephen: "Fuckers."

a moment in the day: picture

I'm sitting in a vintage dress on an antique chair in the early evening sun. Crouched in front of me, Eric aims the camera and fires off shots as Stephen, assisting, holds the big reflector, angling it so that its gold surface bounces sunlight across my face.

Something deeply ingrained says, who am I to be sitting here having my picture taken. 

Eric has been on a mission to photograph Portland writers and artists, treating them to long, intimate sessions behind his camera, capturing them with his magical eye. He says, "Let your neck relax. Picture yourself in an opium den."

Opium dens are, of course, not where anyone would picture me, but I'm giving myself over to everything he says this evening. I let my head loll against the back of the chair. He leans in and his camera goes ksh ksh ksh.

"Loosen your jaw," Stephen says. "You keep all your tension in your jaw."

I relax my chin, let my mouth open a bit. Something deeply ingrained says, don't open your mouth, you'll look slack-jawed and unintelligent. I don't know where to look, then remind myself I can look wherever I want. I glance to my right, I glance down, I glance to the camera. Ksh ksh ksh.

Eric pauses in his shots to check out what he's been getting and then he turns the camera backwards toward me. "Have a look at this." His enthusiasm is infectious and calming. It momentarily quiets the voices in me. I look into the viewfinder. My vision tunnels down into darkness and stops on a tiny, luminous image of me. It looks beautiful and I tell him so. 

Something deeply ingrained says, who am I to think an image of me is beautiful. 

Feels egocentric, feels like it must be a lie.

He turns the camera back around and the session continues. I settle back in the chair. Light from Stephen's reflector dances and winks.

Eric says, "Close your eyes."

I've been thinking lately about that thing you do where you look at an old picture of you from when you were younger and you think, if only I'd known how good I looked back then. If only I had appreciated it. That's a universal experience and it can happen at any age. Seventy-five, and you're looking back on your fifty-five-year-old self and saying, why didn't I appreciate it? Eighty-five and you're looking back on seventy-five. You know what would be nice? If we change that narrative: be fifty-five and make the active decision to look at and appreciate it now.

Eric says, "Open your eyes."