It’s graininess gives away it’s age, just as the hairstyles in it do. It is from a time before “selfies” and cell phones. It is from a time when our every moment was not captured on camera, a time when photographs cost you time and money.

In it I am sitting, facing down and to my right. I am smiling, but it is an uncertain smile, a “what am I getting into” smile? I have been hurt before, and am wary.

She is facing me from my right, her back to the camera, leaning in to me as though to kiss, so that you see her profile. Her smile is golden, confidant, it harbors no doubts. Her hand is on my chest, on my heart, where it belongs. She too has been hurt, but she is unafraid to jump back in. She has tested the water’s depths and has found them less fearful when swimming with a loved one than it is floundering alone on the land. It was the reason I stayed, I think, her confidence in me... that I was the one. She was always so sure.

The picture has the look of a very personal moment, so I wonder who was there to take it? I cannot remember. She probably does. She remembers all of our moments together.

We look so young on glossy cardboard, like kids. If I could have known then what I know now, I would have looked at her with that same confidence that she exuded, and I wonder how she knew, how she saw all of the happiness that was coming? How could she have been so sure of the life that was coming?

“He’s your only son, isn’t he?” a mother I didn’t know asked at my son’s fifth birthday party. I’d let him invite his closest friends from pre-school and that included a lot of new parents for me. Of course, I knew the children from Alex’s stories in the evening and pick up every day when I spent at least ten minutes playing whatever he and his friends were playing to ease him out of school to departure and home.

“Yes, he is,” I responded to the smirking mother.

“I thought so,” she said, walking away from my bookcase that was full not of books but rather portraits of my son at various ages involved in myriad activities: climbing; hiking; swimming; running; playing baseball – watching the ball he’d just hit sail over the house; tree-climbing; dining; the untainted, sweet yawn of the newborn.

I stood by the shelves as the children and parents milled about, finding a spot on the floor, the couch, the window seat, the chairs in order to better see the party entertainment: a magician. I looked at the pictures the sarcastic mom had belittled with her tone, and tears came to my eyes as I looked at all the years I would never have again. The hay ride when he was three where he was able to not only pick a pumpkin which he decorated as well, but also to ride a pony for the first time and pet a variety of farm animals, his face full of awe. The pool in Puerto Rico from which he alighted every ten minutes or so to run on his little legs to the bathroom quite a distance from the pool. (What three-year-old doesn’t pee in the pool, I thought?)

“Who wants to be my helper for the first trick?” the magician asked.

“Me!” screamed a dozen four and five year olds. Alex sat shyly in the front not sure if he should scream, too.

“Well, I think maybe the birthday boy should come up and pick our first assistant.”

Click. My husband took a picture of the beaming Alex as he proudly got up and stood next to the magician. He glanced at the sea of expectant faces and said in a soft voice,

“Maybe my mommy could help with the first one.” Click. My husband took a picture of me.

It was a crisp spring morning, the dew still shining on the blades of grass that were uncut by the blades of a mower. I was standing on gravel, the stone pieces crunching under my flip-flops as I held my camera.

I had no moment I intended to capture, though I figured that there would be one. The sunlight was bright, although tempered by its youth in the early morning.

My companion was my dog, Morton. A mutt of around two, with mournful dark brown eyes and a body equal parts brown and white, he was capable of sprinting about like a maniac one second and sleeping a moment later. He was also smart, brilliant in his own way. He knew me.

So as we were standing three-quarters of the way down the driveway, he anticipated what was about to happen; I shifted, putting my body into more of a squat. Morton's ears pricked, the mournfulness of his gaze tempered by his budding excitement. His swirl of a tail waved around, as he opened his mouth, grinning, elated. He knew the expression I had on, the position I was in.

I inhaled and began.

"Morton! What are you doing, Morton?!" I did the lovechild of a crab-like walk and a shuffle, jumping forward and slapping my free hand against my bare thigh. My voice raised in pitch, mock-scolding. "What do you think you're doing, young man?! Just what do you think you're doing?"

Morton crouched as if to pounce, his eyes shining, the picture of youthful exuberance. When I repeated my earlier statements, moving forward and slapping at my thigh to encourage him, he began sprinting in circles at top speed, rushing through the grass and leaving trails in his wake. I began snapping pictures, occasionally jogging towards him.

At the moments when he'd rush by me, I'd reach out to slap at his tail, which only made him wilder. The grass and the dew recorded his path.

Once, he paused, standing in the grass, attentive and looking oddly serious. I captured his stance, grinning. He stooped again when I moved forward, ready to get him up and moving again.

When at last he moved again, I merely watched, the moment before sheathed in time by the camera.

His paws kicked up the gravel when he ran around the driveway, and watching him made my head spin with him. Only once did he slip, but it was a small moment, and then he recovered and continued running.

As it was with him, everything seemed to last only a moment, and the sun burned away the dew.

Note: Rest in Peace, Morton (2016-2018). You were loved, you adorable mutt. May you live forever.

There's a picture of me standing with my youth group in Nicaragua when I was 15. Everyone is clapping and singing something, and I'm scowling in the back.

Maybe it's because the sun was in my eyes. Or because I followed the rules for once and didn't bring any "nice" clothes for church so I got stuck wearing ratty old athletic clothes in a crowd of girls in pretty dresses. Perhaps even because that's just how my face has always been, even when I was 15. But it wasn't any of those reasons.

Standing there, sweaty, on the last Sunday morning of my mission trip to Nicaragua, I realized that I was an atheist. I realized that in the one place where everyone was supposed to belong and be loved, I would never feel those things. And I didn't even want to.

It's funny that I had to go all the way to Nicaragua to realize what I did. I had to spend ten days translating for doctors, helping distribute medicine, and building cisterns to understand. I had to do God's work to figure out that I didn't believe in God.

I guess I was scowling because I felt lied to. I didn't go to Nicaragua because God had chosen me. It had always been my choice. I went because I'd been learning Spanish for three years and I wanted to use it in the real world. I went because I wanted ten days of peace away from my family. I went because I knew it would look good on college applications.

I could only be called a "holy child of God" so many times until I realized that I wanted to be anything else but that.

She is still a child

No idea what is yet to come

Happy, innocent and wild

She only knows freedom

She looks up at him with loving eyes

He looks at her the same

Time is infinite, moments everlasting

Until the next day came

You can’t see it in her eyes

In his either

But this moment was their last

As she walks out the door, smiling ear to ear

He shouts after her, “come back now, you hear!”

She says she will, no idea what is yet to come

The very next day he’s gone

The rest of her life has begun

Without him to guide her

Show her the way

All that’s left is the picture

Frozen in time, where they’ll forever lay

lining up little bottles

of pasty mustard and pastel pink,

cerulean blue and kumquat orange

and shocking green

that blinds you

first is the pinky nail

you wipe it clean

and push back the skin

that you later learn (at the hospital)

is called a cuticle

then then next four fingers

on your left hand

in alternating colors that form

an uneven rainbow,

yellow, green, orange, blue, pink,

you get to your right hand

shakily, your non-dominant hand

paints your other hand, literally

your other hand, your left hand trembling

like it has a stutter, and missing the nail

and polka dotting your skin

this wasn't your manicure kit,

(does gender even matter?)

you shouldn't be messing with it.

mother calls your name and you quickly grab the camera

and snap a photograph of your newly painted nails,

your hand slightly covering the lens to catch a bit of beige-pink in the pic

before dropping the polish and sprinting to the door,

but the wood is slippery, and you fall,

your arm cracking against the floor.

the pain explodes like a bomb to the tips of your toes

and the scalp of your head

and the tips of your newly painted fingers

and laughs of guilt and joy of colorful hands

turns to screams of pain and streaming tears

the photo only shows

what happened before the moment

i look at my nails now

and i think i still see a tiny speck of

pasty mustard and pastel pink,

cerulean blue and kumquat orange

and shocking green

that blinds me

Of that moment you wish to immortalise.

That moment when you first learnt how to ride a bike.

Learnt to bake a cake.

Learning to read, write and share.

Pictures of that moment you spent with family.

A great day out

Forever captured in a photograph

Freezing that moment into your mind.

Making it live on in your mind.

In your heart.

Living forever in memory

That moment frozen in any number of photographs.

Just waiting to be brought back to life.

Reminders of the sounds, smells and tastes.

How you felt being around your tribe

I tried it because it was fun, my phone pink like our cheeks on the front of the boat. The bow? Starboard? For a girl raised near the ocean, I knew stunningly little about boats. I guess I had alwasy preferred to swim.

It was a wild country, in the fact that no one had bothered to tame it, not that it refused to be tamed--and we felt that same way. We were on a boat, headed to the Arctic Circle and even the boat nodded "yes, yes, yes" as it bobbed up and down beneath our feet.

Trying to take in the emensity of that country went about as well as I thought it would. Panoramas don't work well on boats; the railing of the boat in the picture turned out to be disjointed and hilarious. We laughed at my attempt for serveral seconds, before returning our gaze to the high mountians, the choppy water and the pleasure of firm ground beneath our feet that still bucked and tipped like any good pirate ship could.

Truth be told, it wasn't a pirate ship, but we were headed to the Arctic Circle and Iceland wasn't a country but a feeling. It refused to be tamed--it was itself. Though we were on our way to adventure at the tip of the world, the ferry itself had tv screens that showed the picks for the icelandic national soccer team for the world cup. As my sister and I puked and filled six paper bags, the kind captian of the boat came down from where he sat on the stormy seas to clean up after us, and to give us more of the paper bags.

We used the clean bags, later, to store cheese as we toured the country that refused to be summed up in a picture, that was too emense for memories, but that still picked soccer teams and had a ship captain who sailed into the Arctic Circle enough that he could leave his helm to clean up after two adventurous girls.