This is Reading Photographs, a newsletter for those interested in remarkably mundane photographs and why the details, ideas, emotions, memories, connections and beliefs they arouse make them meaningful.
My maternal grandmother’s 100th birthday was Tuesday. She died less than a month after her 99th.
I took this photo of her trimming deadheads from the salmon pink geraniums on the deck of the duplex she shared with my grandfather in their retirement community in May 2011. He would be dead roughly a year later.
This is a film photograph captured with the first decent film camera I ever bought myself, a Canon AE-1 Program. I had begun dabbling in film the year before after shooting exclusively in digital for years. I’m lazy and don’t want to dig up the negatives but based on the color cast and saturation I’d say this is a form of Fujifilm ISO 400. The grain is pretty noticeable in the blurred background of the green lawn and bleached pavement of the road behind her house. I clearly was trying to follow rule of thirds and let empty space make the foreground pop, but I was maybe only marginally successful. There’s just enough sharpness to make out the stray cobweb between blooms in the middle of the frame (I may have been attempting to make that the focus but failed miserably). But it’s the flowers themselves that are the most sharp, particularly the leaves and unopened buds toward the bottom of the middle plant.
I took two other shots at the same time but I didn’t find them as interesting.
We spent more time with my mom’s folks than my dad’s as they lived much closer to us. Not just for holidays but for overnights and weekends. They had a grand old house during my childhood and when I visited I often helped with gardening. I went with my grandfather to the hardware store, helped pot new planters. And then there were the geraniums; big pots that would be set out on terraces or in front of doors. They overwintered them, moving them to a sunny window in the attached former carriage house above the kitchen each fall. Of course, they didn’t always make it and so each spring my grandmother would hunt for ones with salmon pink blooms, the only acceptable shade. Sometimes this necessitated a day long excursion between gardening stores and nurseries.
As my grandparents and their home aged, they elected to have their architect daughter design them a new but much smaller and easier to maintain home where they lived through my late high school and college years. It was after I had moved across the country for my first post-college job that they moved to a duplex in a retirement community where they had a much smaller deck but also a little sunroom where they kept some more delicate and exotic plants.
But it is salmon pink geraniums that endure as my strongest reminder of her. Even when my grandfather died I couldn’t stop thinking about them. After I had stood with my mother as he breathed his last breaths in the hospital, after my grandmother (who had gone to change her clothes after days spent in his room) had rushed back but not in time, after I and my siblings had clung to each other sobbing in the hospice wing’s family room, we went back to their, now only her, home. As I said, she hadn’t been home in days and all of her plants showed it. I worked with my mother to water the ones in the small sunroom, which while maybe wilted were still alive. And then I looked out on the deck at where the geraniums always were and they were shriveled and brown, baked in the Midwestern summer heat.
I wrote the following poem in my journal afterward…
We watered plants
Day lily, vines, jasmine,
Ignored crumbling geraniums.That was after
We traveled boulevards
And past churches, a synagogue.We were sitting
Earlier, watching my niece.
She played. Our tears went unnoticed.They came from what
I’d just seen and just heard.
The others, though, they’d only heard.I watched him die
And I stood there, silent.
And then. And then he was silent.The day lily
Will spring back, the jasmine.
But the geraniums.
My grandmother’s memorial service was this past winter but last weekend I flew back sans wife and kids to help my mother, uncles, siblings, and cousins spread her ashes. We did it in the little garden in front of the church where they spread my grandfather’s ashes more than a decade ago, where my sisters were both married, where my parents married, where my grandparents themselves were the first couple to be married.
No geraniums, but I hope these near-salmon pink impatiens sufficed.
Love your story, my mother had a cousin, who we always thought of as mom's sister, and she also did geraniums, this smell of the plants and the pink flowers❤️❤️ thank you Ty, love🐻
Lovely piece. Sorry for your loss, Ty.