Images

60: (May 2026)

We live in a culture that loves to capture images. The days have long gone by when a handful of treasured photos were pasted into photo books or slipped between sheets of clear plastic for posterity. With the advent of digital photos, images have become like junk food—we gorge upon them—and I’m certainly no exception.

Maybe those digital images are meant to be disposable, like so much else in our overly consumeristic society. Yet I cling to the concept that photos are meant to be saved, like deeply beloved treasures. E.g., if my house was on fire, my photo albums might be the only thing I would try to retrieve before running out the door.

That said, I was recently helping my mother, now in her nineties, sort through a lifetime of photos. By ‘sort,’ I mean put them in boxes with the hope of looking at them or sorting them into categories another time; my mother has neither the inclination nor energy to do so at present. So far we packed 14 moving boxes filled with photo albums and innumerable envelopes stuffed with photos. And that’s not including her digital photos.

Like my mother, the sheer quantity of photos I already have makes it unlikely that I’ll ever pore over them in the future. So I’m reconsidering my photo gluttony! I don’t want to burden my family with boxes of old, fading photos, and hard drives filled with tons of pictures taken at whimsy when I’m gone. A few carefully curated photo albums is one thing, but dozens and dozens of photos taken of the flowers in my garden, deer grazing in the pasture, or even of our grandchildren—adorable as they are—probably doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Maybe the compulsion to take so many photos is an unconscious desire to try to hold onto the moments we’ve captured in an image. Photos may bring back memories, but ultimately each moment is replaced with a new one, and we can never really hold onto the past. I don’t want to waste my precious moments on earth looking back too much; a little bit is okay, but from now on, I’ll be doing less snapping and more attempts at etching the moments directly into my heart.

40: (May 2006)

Flowers are tenacious. Tenacious as weeds, really. What are flowers, after all, but weeds that have been relabeled? Weeds so lovely that they are elevated into a category of life deemed worthy of conscious cultivation. I love to grow perennials. They return, year after year, multiplying, spreading, splashing their joyous bursts of color onto the earth. Flowers know one language: beauty. They soothe, they encourage. They celebrate! They speak of love and life, courage and indomitable spirit. Children sometimes give flowers on Mother’s Day, and then they are scented with sweetness.

Do flowers grow in Iraq? Do flowers grow on bloodstained earth, where mothers’ cries seep into the soil on tears shed for sons and daughters and husbands? Do flowers grow in Fallujah, where children ache with pain from lack of clean drinking water, in a city bombed beyond recognition? Do flowers die, too, from this unclean drink? Or will a few die-hard blossoms poke up through the rubble? Will there always be a few children from neighborhoods destroyed by war, who will live to tell the tale of bombs falling, evacuations, lack of clean drinking water, and ravage of one sort or another?

I like to think there will come a time when these tales will astonish. That grandchildren and great-grandchildren will gape and marvel at such stories from the past. That they will not be able to comprehend how mothers and grandmothers could stand to lose their children and grandchildren, or why people had not yet learned how to resolve differences without killing each other.

“Grown-ups really did that?” they will shriek in disbelief. “Yes,” the mothers will reply. “Yes, they did. These things really did happen.” And the children will shake their heads in wonder and then run off to play, weaving a path amidst the fields of sunflowers, spreading so mightily that one might think they were threatening to take over the world.

60-40:

And here we are yet again, still mired in violence, in destruction. I may be one person, essentially helpless to stop the tide of insanity being rained upon so many people around the world, but my flower gardens have expanded with each passing year. They will continue to be defiant, occupying a small patch of ground, taking a stance for beauty and ever-blossoming life upon the face of this imperiled earth.