White clouds in blue sky slowly moving past, the sharp angle of the roof slanting down, a slide going somewhere; the green leaves dotting the white stucco, the sun umbrella shading it all, shadows.

I liked taking pictures better when I didn’t know what might show up: dropping the film off in the little black canisters at Walgreen’s, sometimes finding a roll undeveloped years later and taking it in: who was that?  Always a surprise: that girl in camouflage popping up again, holding onto a tree, posing in front of my parents’ cabin after my father died, log and wood, the old barn, crumbling down.  Before his death, my father would go there to pick the blackberries out by the lake, spend hours taking in the land walking the perimeter, smoking his pipe, watching the sun set or rise; or he watched the changing sky from the dock on a lawn chair maybe, dangled his feet in the water; this I only imagine.  I was never there until years later, arm hugging that tree, posing.  The man I was with snapped his camera while I moved this way and that, imagining what he saw through the artifice of his lens.

Years later I remember my own daughter, watching her, taking her high school senior photos in Forest Park, holding onto the tree, hugging her body around its base, moving this way and that.  Now there is immediate satisfaction, the photographer calling her over and showing her the girl she had become through his lens.  She was enamored; the surprise of recognizing: I am someone else.