Posts made in March, 2011
Looking Up, Looking Down
Ha! You thought this was going to be another post about me feeling all emotionally challenged, didn’t you? Well no, there’s been quite enough of that. This is a post about actually looking up and down With your eyeballs. Not even metaphorical ones.
The thing I have loved most since discovering photography hasn’t, perhaps surprisingly, been the images I’ve produced. I think I’m an okay photographer. Considering I’ve never had a photography lesson, can’t afford Photoshop and basically make it up as I go along, I think I make some decent pictures. I’ve got a lot to learn, and I like that. I like seeing that my photos have improved from this time last year, like the feeling of growing into a skill. My challenge this year is to learn how to make my photos less noisy and sharper, something I find hard to do for some reason, and to get more confident using my manual settings. It’s fun. And less-than perfect images don’t matter.
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Mothers’ Mothers
I was made from other people’s stories. They were good ones, too. They follow behind me in a great long line, like ticker-tape, connecting me to my mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother, and all the way back, further than I know, although I have done my best to learn them. These stories are the reason I was born, the reason our mothers were born. Each daughter starts a new one, overlapping with their mother for a while, before our mother’s stories stop and we have to carry it on alone. We are writing quite a tale, me and the women who came before me. I want to tell you ours in honour of the woman whose story stopped at quarter to four on Tuesday, my dearest Grandmother, the mother of my mother.
In 1837 a woman named Ann, whose maiden name I do not know, had a daughter who she named Elizabeth, her fifth child and middle child. They lived in London, and after Elizabeth, Ann went on to have four more children – five daughters and four boys, the stories of whom I do not yet know but hope to, like ripples spreading out from this central stone drop of which I’m formed. But Elizabeth Eliza’s story I do know. For when she was 26 she married, at St. Saviour’s church in Chelsea – I have the wedding certificate sat next to me here now, and her and her husband Frederick went on to have nine children themselves: six boys and three girls. Her middle child was also a girl, and she named her after herself and after her older sister: Elizabeth Ann, my great, great Grandmother.
Read MoreMother’s Day come early
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.- Iris Murdoch
A huge thank you to Interflora for putting a much-needed smile on my face this morning by sending me this beautiful early Mother’s Day bouquet.
Interflora asked me to nominate another mum blogger who I thought deserved a treat in the run-up to Mother’s Day so this post is dedicated to my nominee, Michelle who blogs at Utterly Scrummy. Michelle always seems to have kind word to say, offering support and encouragement and good humour no matter what she might be struggling with herself. It feels a real privilege to count you as a friend Michelle, thank you for everything you do for me.
I was so upset to hear that Michelle had lost family in the recent New Zealand earthquake and yet she carried herself through it all with her usual dignity and compassion. I know flowers don’t bring people back, but I can’t think of anyone more deserving of something to make her smile this year.
So Happy Mother’s Day Michelle, from me and Interflora, who will be sending you something lovely soon. X
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