Capturing You

Chapter 27: Flowers Made of Sun

      When I was a little girl, summers would pass by slowly. With dad scouting for new players and training with the main team, and my mom fixated with painting and wrangling her daily chores (she always thought she needed to do more than she already was; it was her compulsive need to clean), I had a good chunk of the day mostly to myself until we shared a meal together at night. I wasn't always in the mood to hang out with my cousins, finding them at times a bit too rowdy for even someone as laid back as I was — or at least thought myself to be — and not always wanting to be a farmhand for my uncle. So, when it was just me, and really just me, it felt like every second passed by a mile away from the other.

      I would dig through my parents' belongings in the attic, where I definitely wasn't allowed to be, unraveling piles of yellowing paperwork, boxes of smushed holiday decorations, and miscellaneous family keepsakes. Every corner of the attic was like my playground when the swings and the slide and the monkey bars outside got too juvenile for my wandering curiosity. Most of the things I'd likely think were interesting now went over my head, though — all except for one thing. Around 13, I found my now-deceased grandfather's 35mm film camera tucked neatly in a medium-sized box with a few photo albums in it.

     I remembered bringing the dusty box down from the attic and spending a whole afternoon sifting through it in the living room, flipping through pages and pages of photographs my grandpa took of his family, my dad as a little kid included. That only kept my attention for a few minutes before I remembered the old camera. I aimed it at the front door of our house from the inside, and I remembered being so enamored by the way the lense caught the sun beaming in from the floral cut-out design of the door. It made a pretty pattern on the wood floor and I took a photo of it. Surprisingly, the camera still worked — but it was a bitch to figure out how to develop the photo, and whatever other pictures were in the film strip.

       My mom, though, saw my newfound interest and thought to cultivate it. She was forever a starving artist, almost to the point where it came second to being a mother to me (she was every bit of loving still — don't get me wrong), but when she heard that I'd suddenly taken a liking to some clunky old camera, she took it as my first sign of blossoming into a prodigy. The first time I'd mentioned I found the camera, she drove us the next day to a print shop in New Orleans where we spent the afternoon learning how to use the camera and develop film for it.

     "But this stuff's not practical to have laying around the house unless you're a professional, or stinkin' rich," said Earl, the owner of the shop, of all the equipment we needed to have our own darkroom at the farmhouse. He'd just taken the last almost two hours developing a few of my shots, which lay on the table we all sat at. "You'd have to come use the studio a lot, and — to be honest with you — it's not cheap, either."

     Earl was a thin and tall man somewhere in his late thirties, younger than you would expect him to be; he wore a pair of glasses and a mismatched brown corduroy suit. At the time I didn't know much about chasing your dreams, but, in Earl's cramped little photo studio just off Bourbon Street, I thought a guy as young as he was, dedicated to something so archaic as to own a whole business around it, was doing just that.

     My mom looked sad. Dad made good money but a lot of it went back to bills, and she was in the same boat. We didn't live paycheck to paycheck or anything, but money moved fast in our household; a majority of it was stuffed in my college fund and the rest fed and housed us. I was ready to forget about the whole thing; New Orleans was far away — farther than our little farmhouse on our own little lake, at least — and it wasn't worth it to come here just to develop some of my amateur photographs. At the time, I wanted to be a teacher, after all. It was fun to take photos for a day but I was over it; my flip phone would be enough.