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THE EMBRACE A
LOVING EMBRACE A
Widow Bit – Dec. 30, 2007
The
photo arrived by chance on Christmas Eve in a box from the newspaper. We
sold the paper a dozen years ago, but still, when cupboards get cleaned
out, the staff finds detritus from the Andrist-Koch era.
The photo is of me, taken by John nearly 30 years ago when I was
playing the autoharp at a bluegrass musical jam. As I look at it now,
I’m awed to think that I was once that young, that carefree, that
slender! I don’t believe I ever saw the print when John made it—an
8-by-10 black and white glossy that he filed in a box with other
personal stuff.
The picture says more about the photographer than me. John is
either seated or kneeling on the grass, shooting up at me from ground
level, catching me with my toes up—obviously tapping the beat of the
music.
When I print photos of people, I tend to crop tight around the
individual, eliminating any distractions in the background. John wanted
to tell a story, so he included all those seeming distractions. Even
though there’s only one person in the picture, you know it’s a
gathering.
I am gazing, with a slight smile, at something or someone
off-camera. I’m sitting on the end of a bench by a picnic table
covered with bags, bottles and things people bring to picnics. There’s
a can of Coors at my elbow and at the edge of the photo a can of
Schlitz—presumably belonging to someone also off-camera, in the other
direction.
The photo tells much about John’s darkroom skills at a time
before computerized image doctoring. Making the print must have been
challenging because the lighting is dappled. There’s strong sunlight
on my tapping foot, but my face and the picnic table are in shade. The
background, showing the corner of an old house amidst many trees, ranges
from deep shade to bright light.
I can imagine John standing at the enlarger, waving his fingers
in a darkroom technique known as “dodging and burning” to even the
exposure. Everything in the final print is sharp and clear, from the
strings on my autoharp to the peeling paint on the wooden bench.
What I love most, though, is the focal point: It’s not my face,
but the musical instrument I’m playing. You play the autoharp by
holding it upright in your lap and embracing it.
That musical embrace is the action in John’s photo. I embraced
the instrument; he embraced me with the camera, then prolonged that
embrace with the painstaking process of turning film into photograph.
Throughout our marriage, before his stroke, we began each day
with a cup of coffee and a loving embrace. I sorely missed those
embraces after John was paralyzed, when he could no longer wrap his arms
around me. And so on Christmas, just as I thought his embrace was gone
forever, there it was and always will be, in black and white.
© Mary Koch, Omak, Washington 2008
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