Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: church, hallway, junk shop, primary colors, self portrait
a junk shop in Westmoreland County
Usually the photos support the text in my posts or vice versa, but these four outtakes don’t really belong together. I just liked how they turned out and wanted to share them. They are evidence of some of the things I’ve done this past month – trash hunting, getting lost, a photo shoot with Sarah, a Sunday morning where I tried to take a picture of myself staring at the camera, but found the last photo the best of the batch. I’ve had insomnia and neck pain, a week where I cried over ’70s romance films, where I ate lots of dark chocolate goat’s milk fudge. I thought about how I take hundreds of photos each month and weed out the shit to only a few images. I don’t feel as if every photo taken is a precious moment or should be seen. I learned through writing and grieving to listen to my heart and let go.
the last photo at Sarah's
mckeesport
insomnia
Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: 1970s, cinderblock, creepy, high school, westmoreland
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Last weekend I dropped off artwork for the Westmoreland Art Nationals and got creeped out by the sci-fi fluorescent lighting in this community college, which looked so much like my old high school. I know I watch too many crappy horror flicks, but isn’t there something really eerie about an empty high school circa 1976? The flesh-colored lockers, the one lamp still turned on in a dark library. All these arbitrary numbers painted on cinderblock, marking the end of each hallway.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: city, downtown, hotel, image stories, self portraits, william penn
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My friend Kris, whom I’ve known for almost 15 years, got married on May 7. It was a lovely wedding – simple and elegant, a grown-up affair that gave me the chance to wear one of my vintage lbd’s, drinking glass after glass of Chardonnay. Yet my inner trashiness surfaced as I hogged through plates of dumplings, invaded empty lounge areas for photos and cursed my awesome-looking heels as they tortured my feet. Events like weddings give me access to places I normally wouldn’t have the courage to just walk into for photo opportunities. In between the cocktail reception and dinner we ran around the lobby, then the tea room, rode the elevators to check out different floors. It was like stepping into the plot of the mystery novels I love so much when I need an escape.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: beginnings, bridges, endings, neville island, windows
my sister's kitchen window
I don’t know what to do with my Sundays now that my mother is gone. Last weekend when I drove out to visit my sister, I took a different route to get to her place — instead of the long way down West Carson through McKees Rocks and over a long twisting road that I don’t even know the name, I took 65 and over the McKees Rocks bridge. I liked taking the long way so I could listen to music, or pull over the car so I could take photos. But now it’s as if I just want to hurry to my destination. The drive, the music, the long winding road – it was all part of the ritual that led up to the visits with my mother. Last Sunday was super windy and cold, like the tail end of a winter that just won’t quit. I think: turn of season, a change of scenery, a light up ahead.
contemplating photos
Tyson
view from the McKees Rocks bridge
windy afternoon
Like this:
Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: altar, collections, family history, self portraits
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I collect to remember the past. The altar came from a junk shop in Braddock, the Orthodox icon from an estate sale. A ’70s dress and uncombed hair. Blue-robed virgin from Pennsylvania Dutch country. One saint found in a garden, another in one of my mother’s coat pockets. My great-grandmother and father Dell’Aquila from Puglia. I piece together shards of personal history, through photos, through yellowed scraps of paper that my mother stashed in boxes. I keep having dreams where she is alive. She weaves stories from her place at the kitchen table and when I wake up, it’s as if she visited me in real life. And then there are dreams where she isn’t in them at all, but I feel lost, something amiss, like catching the glimpse of someone leaving a room before she closes the door behind her.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: laughter, mourning, neville island, rapunzel, sister
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At the beginning of this month, I met up with friends for dinners and brunches, worked on some photos. Caught up writing thank-you’s for the funeral, writing in my journal. Now it’s quiet. Friends who have also lost loved ones warned me this would happen – a flood of condolences. Then life goes on — the part that’s hard for me. I don’t feel depressed. It’s just hard for me to listen to others’ problems with this heavy weight in my mind. It’s difficult being fully ‘Lisa’ right now. This period in my life is the most surreal I have ever known. Even with all the tears, there has been a lot of laughter too. How is this possible. But it is – side-splitting laughter over the dumbest things. Jeff and I singing our own lyrics to familiar songs. My sister making “ugly face.” Life is absurd, sometimes in beautiful,unexpected ways. Nobody makes me laugh like those two and I need the small things now more than ever.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: end of winter, life as story, sing, ukulele
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In a strange turn of life events, my friend Jody’s mother died a week after my mother. I’ve had a crushing amount of love and support during this really hard time, but it’s almost surreal to talk with a friend who not only knows what you are going through, but knows it right along with you. If I had written this in a short story, I could hear my writing peers saying,”that couldn’t happen in ‘real’ life.” But life is this coincidental and I’m not sure when fiction became the blueprint for reality. It’s why I’ve been buried in fairy tales and mysteries since I left grad school, why I’ve stopped looking for definitive answers. Normally I go into a photo shoot armed with notes on what I plan to do. Once Jody picked up her ukulele I let the strings take over as she plucked a fractured tune. I listened to her sing.
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It feels as if this year has gone on forever and it’s only March. February is one awful dream. Which surprises me because I didn’t feel disconnected as I tried (try) to adjust to daily life right after my mother’s death. If anything, I felt so much, I thought my heart would burst. Now I’m exhausted. I am trying to catch up with emails and phone calls. I am trying to get through a book that I’ve read for the past month. The point is, I am trying. On Sunday, I went over my friend Jody’s house to take some photos. I wasn’t in the mood to do self portraits, but Jody made a great model. Once I’m behind the camera, I become lost in that moment. It calms my nerves, keeps my brain from racing and the sadness quiet. It keeps me going.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: carnegie museum, grieving, in like a lion, march
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Some days will be better than others since my mother’s been gone. I know this intellectually, but feeling through it is another story. This past Saturday I felt close to my old self, rummaging through an estate sale where we found some Greek icons and a box of magic tricks that Jeff once had as a kid. The house was insane. From the front, it looked like a typical suburban ranch, but inside was a maze of 18 rooms filled with shag carpet, mirrored wallpaper, palinka bottles and flickering electric candles. It was a prelude to round two of organizing my mother’s own estate on Sunday. I don’t know what makes any of us think that we’re going to go for a few weekends and be done with it, but it’s just one more way the brain battles with the heart, tricking you into hurrying through your grief instead of facing it.
I took the photos in this post in January when Jeff and I had our annual first date. I was going to write about the secret pockets of the museum, how I love the building almost more than the exhibits it holds. It reminds me of Friday library nights with my mother, where every three weeks she’d take my sister and me to Oakland so we could borrow books. I loved reading in the stacks in the winter evenings, inhaling library scent as I flipped through The Three Investigators or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. So this post is about a good memory of my mother. About the childhood want to live in a museum, or losing myself in fiction when I don’t want to deal with reality. It’s about how the world moves around my family and me as we are left grieving together, and most days, alone.
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This past Sunday eight of us spent ten hours organizing my mother’s life into boxes, and we’re not anywhere near finished. I had anxiety all weekend, thinking of packing her things away, but even more anxiety thinking about all the things we’d have to give away. My mother was a collector; housekeeping wasn’t really her thing. I found hospital paperwork for one of my eye surgeries from 1979, along with my first hospital gown. My sister’s sequined prom dresses stashed in the basement. Old high school letters that still held a faint scent of amber. Recipes written on scraps of yellowed paper. A sonogram of my niece. Journals stacked in closets, next to her bed, on the kitchen table. And the photos – hundreds of them, tucked into books, into boxes. They fluttered out of pages as we shook paperbacks and shuffled papers. So many projects started with the intention of finishing. I didn’t grow up in the house that she shared with my stepfather for 16 years, so I don’t have that kind of sentimental attachment to her space. But I hurried ahead of Jeff when I got out of the car so that I could have a few moments alone with what she left just as it was a few weeks ago.
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