Sometimes the best part of location scouting is stumbling into someone else's world. Tonight, while looking for a few beautiful spots for an upcoming senior session at Pitney Meadows in Saratoga Springs, I did just that. I watched two young girls walking through the community garden. They were high-school aged, and at one point they stopped at the sunflowers and began taking pictures of each other. And like a million little needles, I felt my heart start to prick. Earlier this summer, I lost a childhood friend.
Mai was really more like an honorary big sister. She was my sister's best friend, and we all grew up together, playing in Mrs. Myers' garden and stealing pomegranates from her yard. And more than a hundred times, I had watched this exact scene unfold. My sister and Mai taking silly pictures of each other with anything they could find, usually on an old disposable camera. The funny thing was, from where I was standing tonight, I could see that these girls were taking their pictures too low. Their faces would probably be too dark. The sky behind them was completely blown out. All the little things the photographer in me now knows to notice. But isn't that the best part of living in a memory?
When we searched for photographs of Mai for her funeral, very few of them were technically "right." There were blown-out skies. Bad angles. Probably plenty of missed focus and terrible lighting. And not one bit of it mattered. Because every photograph was full of her. Her joy. Her smile. Her life. You didn't notice a blown-out sky because, in the discovery of those images, all you wanted to look at was her beautiful face. As I stood there watching those girls, grief hit swiftly. I turned around and saw the way the sun was spilling over everything. It fell across the gardens and onto a house in the distance, surrounded on all sides by wildflowers. And I hoped, for just a moment, that maybe her house in Heaven looks something like that. So I took a picture.
Not because it was the best photograph I had ever taken.It wasn't. I took it because, in that moment, I wanted to honor her. I wanted to feel connected. I kept walking through the garden, carrying that strange weight grief brings when a memory finds you unexpectedly. Then I found a little barn tucked into the middle of the flowers. It seemed to have been placed there just for children, a tiny place meant to welcome them into the outdoors and let them leave a little of their own magic behind. And it made me smile. Because surely that would be in Mai's Heaven, too. She was forever generous, kind and playful. If Heaven has gardens and places for children to play, I can't imagine Mai being very far from them.
And then, just before I left, when I had finally started to steady myself, I saw it. The most perfect sunflower. And that one stopped me. Sunflowers were Mai's favorite. She loved their yellow, happy disposition, but she especially loved how enormous they could grow. She was known to grow huge ones alongside her own home with her kids. So I lifted my camera one more time. And this photograph was technically beautiful. The light shining through perfectly formed yellow petals against a brilliant blue sky. I don't know what Heaven allows. I don't know if the people we've lost get to reach through somehow and remind us they're okay.
But standing there, looking through my camera at that sunflower, I knew exactly what it felt like. "Hi Kace, I'm okay." And I took the picture. Maybe that's why I've become less interested in whether every photograph is technically perfect. Because someday, someone may hold that photograph for an entirely different reason than the one you took it. They won't care about the highlights. They won't care about the angle. They won't care if you missed focus. They'll just be grateful that for one tiny fraction of a second, someone thought to press the shutter. And the person they love is still there. Smiling back at them.
