In my travels, I found this tree—split and chunked away from itself, crooked and ungainly, and still capable of green. I felt myself a kindred soul. Leave me be for just an hour, ask nothing of me, and I stir inside with story. I don't know how old I look to the world outside. When I am writing I feel ageless.
Sometimes when I'm out walking in the dark, as I've just been, I find myself in the company of K., who has lived seven full decades at least, but isn't a day over 33. She has spectacular green eyes and a jumbo turtle in her back yard, and once, when a girl in Philadelphia, she watched an entire circus come to town, unpack, surprise, then leave; let her tell you about the elephant when you see her. There are hats in her background and many children, two lost already, and K. will tell me about stews and how she makes them; zinnias and how she holds them over, year to year; an after-dinner drink that is hers alone.
She knows who has come and gone in the neighborhood, and we mourn together, as tonight we have, over the loss of a young neighbor—too soon, unexpected, unjust.
Finding K. in the dark is like finding hope on a day when hope is up to no good, has gone hiding. It is this promise whisper, these words in one's head: Beauty, true beauty, never leaves.
I've never photographed K., though someday I must, I will; I need those green eyes forevermore. But last week I was photographing my friend, Judy Evans, whose beauty will never leave her, either.
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