Day 13

I am starting to realize the value of this undertaking, to me specifically, is that it's forcing me to make room in my jam-packed life for something that was once essential to how I met - experienced - processed the world. Once the boys showed up, my existential furniture got a deep rearranging and making pictures was shoved down the list by other essential things like dinner and diaper changes. Photography could always wait while these could not. And so it waited, and waited, and eventually got sort of lost in the hubbub.

The 365 commitment shifts my metaphorical furnishings once again. We were driving home from West Virginia and I'd noticed several intriguing photo possibilities fly by the car windows as we flew down the road, but everyone was hungry and cranky and I just didn't feel like stopping. After an hour we did take a lunch break, then got back on the road again happier (and sleepier) with bellies full. The same propulsive imperative -- home still two hours away -- nagged at me, but shortly after we started driving I spied a parking lot with a stairway to nowhere; apparently there had once been a business there, now long gone. We were stopped at a traffic light in Berryville, Virginia and I sort of sat there staring at this set of concrete stairs, climbing upward to nowhere in particular, feeling totally dazed but also mentally composing a photo. Then the light changed and the weight of habit pushed my foot down on the accelerator.

As we sped away I felt a stab of regret at passing up this odd ziggurat of a stairway -- and then it suddenly occurred to me that I had an obligation. I had yet to make a photo for Day 13, and here was a potential good one waving at me from the side of the road, if only I would stop. So at the next traffic light I pulled a U-turn, boys asking what the heck. "Mama has to take a photograph, guys. We're just stopping for a second," I told them.

And here's the photo. It looks really different from the one in my head. It's nothing very compelling. But at this point in the process it is for me more about making a picture than the picture itself.