Current Photo Friday theme: Wilderness
I submit the above photo from the wilderness of the U.S. Southeast for this week’s challenge not because it has any photographic merit at all. It doesn’t. If you want to see stunning photographs taken from some of the most breathtaking locations worldwide by accomplished photographers, I advise you to click on the link above that will take you to the Photo Friday site. Nothing I have in digital format or in my photo archives can compare to their work.
Instead, what I’m showing you here is one of the earliest photos I ever shot, maybe with my mother’s old Brownie–some camera that she allowed me to take to a Bible camp where my parents sent me one summer.
It’s one of a group of really bad photos I have, but it doesn’t matter that they’re bad. They help me remember a week when I made a friend named Julie, with whom I corresponded for years after we left camp. She helped me understand how much fun it could be to write and receive letters in the mail, no matter how silly the conversations of ‘tweens might have been.
They help me remember that I got my first kiss–from a boy named Marshall–NO TONGUES!–one night next to the lake. He also gave me my first experience of a boy who’ll tell a girl a lie to impress her. (His was about his experience playing Oliver in the theater. I’m sure he played Oliver in some theater, but I suspect it wasn’t on Broadway, as I was led to believe.)
They help me remember lying on the ground at night, staring at a breathtaking sky so full of stars that I still expect to see it whenever I look up. Light pollution in the nation’s fourth largest city doesn’t allow that; still, the sight is locked in my brain.
They help me remember how mean kids can be to one another when they’re forced into bizarre situations like camp. If we are honest when we point fingers at other people’s bad behavior, we admit there’s a kernel of that in all of us–when we so desperately want to belong that someone has to be made an outsider. If we can’t admit and recognize this, we can’t correct our behavior.
So it’s not a great photo–but it’s a great picture.