For Leif: the strength and resilience of trees

My dear friend Leif Anderson, my best buddy since I was six years old, is recovering from major surgery on her right shoulder. For six weeks, she will only have the use of her left (non-dominant) arm and hand. She wrote very beautifully in her last blog before the surgery, that like the heron in her photograph, she was leaning into whatever might come next.

For the first few days after the operation, she stayed with a relative. Now she is at home in her airy house in Mississippi, full of light, alone with her little cat, coping as only she can. Brave and resilient. We have talked several times since she came out of surgery.

This picture is for her--a memory, a reminder that she embodies both the young dancer she was when the original of this picture was made of her by Annie Gallmeyer thirty-some years ago; and the trees that bend and sway outside my window on this autumn day.

I made this picture with Giacomo's Fuji, which he kindly lent me, and which I will return to him on Monday. Here, before I send it back to him, I wanted to play with the multiple exposure mode, so easy to use on this lovely little camera. I am inspired by Duane Michals, for whom pictures are not enough. "I had to write," he says, "about all the things you couldn't see." Michals combines words and pictures, as Blip does, as Blogs do, as Leif and I both do in our own ways. This, then, is for Leif: this multiple exposure. Leif as she was. As she is. Dancing with and without arms lifted to the heavens.

Edit, next day: Leif has read your comments and is moved and supported by them. Thank you. She also reminded me of a poem she wrote and shared with me in 1980, a poem that must have been tucked back in my unconscious, a poem that must have led to this image. She wrote it soon after Annie Gallmeyer made the image I used in this picture (and so it was 30-some and not 40 years ago). With one finger of her left hand, she typed, from memory, this:


WINTER TREE

Woman – like a winter tree –
shows golden before silver.
Thoughts drift…
Leaves drift…
Experience is leaf-like,
drifting past.
Unclothed…
Skeletal pure…
Reaching limbs are splendid,
until woman bursts forth in a new green gown.
                                                                                                     
--Leif Anderson, 1980