A Time To Sigh
The rhythms of photographs and seasons helped me make sense of my world.
This article is an excuse to ask you to consider donating to a GoFundMe for a friend’s children. Jacob was a remarkable human with bipolar disorder. The world recently lost him. He left two daughters behind. Please consider making their lives easier. Here is the link.
Next, some writing.
When you have bipolar disorder, your memory of the seasons is… heavy. Heavy like the 18 inches of snow we used to get when I was young. Heavy in the way that compares the structural integrity of a building to the emotional integrity of a moment. When the season turns and the days become more orange in the second and third week of October, I remember the lights sliding down the wall.
For most of college, I lived in the arts theme house at Amherst, Marsh House. I lived on the third floor, and the windows in my room faced the Setting Sun. I lived, quite literally, just a couple hundred yards from Emily Dickinson's birthplace.
I remember laying on that bedroom floor, watching the light at 4:30 PM, hitting the wall, climbing up the ceiling, and disappearing. I spent a lot of time on that floor. I remember my heart feeling so heavy. I had just discovered photography, and the darkroom was the place I went to make sense of my world.
I also spent a lot of time in the woods. I like the chaos of the tree leaves, the thicket, second-growth forest, and old abandoned farmhouses, and there was much of that in the Pioneer Valley. I ventured out into the woods and got pretty close to naked, drenched myself in trash bags, and took a few photographs with the timer. These photographs were mostly taken with medium—or large-format cameras and took a long time to set up, develop, and print.
A process—an endless process—led to some pictures that I can stand by to this day.
I took the skill home to my family, my mom, and my dad, and photographed them. The last photograph I took of my dad was taken without a lens. I had to make a pinhole on a 4 x 5 view camera because I traveled to my aunt's house without a lens in the camera case.
It was another fall a couple of years later. When you have bipolar, the seasons are heavy.
My aunt is dead now. My father is dead now. My grandmother is dead now. My hope that things would be simple, easy, or make sense is dead now. But I let go of something with the thought that things would be straightforward— cause it's not. I let go of heartbreak, something that breaks you. I let go of seasonal changes, which can scare me. I let go of the fear that another depression would destroy me. I let go of the fear that another season could not be borne. I learned that cycles come and go and that rhythm resets us— if we let it.
We need that rhythm; rhythms tell us who we are.
We need the rhythm of the seasons, and for those with bipolar disorder, we need to let go of the fear that rhythm will destroy us.
That rhythm? It sustains us.
The Farmhouse
The path that led to the farmhouse was obscured if you didn't know what to look for. There was a long bike path between the township of Amherst and North Hampton. That's what you call the town in New England—a township. I'm not sure what the difference is.
There was a path, but it was initially just for walking. I don't know what distinguished one path from another before the advent of college kids on bikes, but it hadn't designated a bike path for the theoretical purpose of cycling. This was an era before cell phones. So, if you were walking or riding a bike on the bike path, you were dead to the world. And no one expected you to be alive to it. It was understood that people would be available sometimes and not available other times.
The place I liked to go, to f- off and disappear to the world, had an exit that didn't look like much of anything from that bike path. There was one section where it went over a stream, and I knew that right after a little bridge over the stream, if you took a hard left and circumvented a rock that looked like it blocked the way but didn't, there was another accessory path. That path was narrow and sometimes overgrown, particularly in the early spring. By fall, things have died down a bit. In that, many of the leaves have died. This particular fall, after a year of utilizing the bike path without a bike and another couple of months in the second year of college, I left the path with a very heavy camera case and tripod. I don't know what was wrong with me. That's a lie. I know what it is. I'm particular. I don't have a problem with schlepping things needed for particular activities.
I enjoy activities that require a lot of kit.
The tripod was made by a company called Manfroto. They are Italian. And they make very Italian tripods. This tripod was designed to support the weight of an extremely heavy camera. Which is what I had in my hand. In fairness, it was a box that carried an extremely heavy Camera and its associated accessories and had a piece of tape across the side come out with a marker on the tape. The marker indicated something very reassuring, I hoped, to authorities. It read, in large black print letters:
“not a bomb”
That should calm everyone's nerves.
Tripping slightly, I put down the box and readjusted the tripod on my back. In subsequent years, this tripod would be lost. I would have to buy another one—this subsequent tripod was made of carbon fiber. The initial tripod could've been made of carbon fiber if I had had a shred of respect for myself.
This auxiliary path was about a foot and a half wide because paths didn't have regulatory standards around their width when they simply meandered through woods. After about five minutes of robust strides, with some stumbling on my part and about a 3% grade upward, I eventually terminated on the clearing.
It was almost perfectly circular. This is in my memory only. I'm sure it wasn't a Perfect Circle. Ovular was an overestimation. But in my memories, it is circular. So, I'm just going to say it was perfectly circular. You're going to believe it. Because that's the kind of trust I'm building between us, as author and reader, I'm going to say a thing is perfectly circular, and you'll understand it's worth believing it was perfectly circular. It makes for a better story. You put your trust in me regarding “a good story.” Both of us are in a position where if I write “it's perfectly circular,” well, for your mind and your enjoyment reading, it will be perfectly circular. It doesn't matter what the truth is or was. It might even be perfectly circular today if the right trees get knocked down or the right bushes grow.
In the middle of this perfectly circular clearing, which measured about 800 yards in diameter and was more or less astride the top of a hill, what is a farmhouse? It was in the northwest quadrant of the circular clearing. It did not have any part of its foundation on what would've been the center of the circle.
The farmhouse was old. 1800s Old. Nobody lived in it. It's hard to imagine why anyone would've lived in it. But nobody lived in it now. It was, I am told, the property of one of the five colleges. I assumed it to be Amherst College, but I could've been Hampshire as well. Presumably, a farmer lived here at some point.
The curious thing about the clearing was that the grass, or at least much of the grass, had been mowed. It wasn't clear who mowed it. It wasn't clear how they got a mower here. It might not even have been an electric mower. But it has been grass. And it has definitely been mowed. Not… recently.
Mowing timeline uncertainty notwithstanding, I picked up the not-a-bomb case, readjusted the Manfroto tripod, and continued walking toward the northwest quadrant of the Perfect Circle, where R. was waiting.