Clear days4

The Clear Days

The Clear Days

Linda Smith

I have known David since I was 4 years old. I remember our first interaction: I was at the playground near my grandmother’s house and I wanted to go down the slide , but Rosemary was trying to help David down. The next thing I remember is that David peeed and his urine was running down the slide. I don’t remember what Rosemary or my mother said, I just remember David on the slide, and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t wait to use the restroom like I did.

The longer I gazed into the storm, the more plainly visible it became. The drifting cloud detritus gave it a kind of visible body, which explained many perplexing phenomena, and published its movements in plain terms, while the texture of the falling mass of rain rounded it out and rendered it more complete. Because raindrops differ in size they fall at different velocities and overtake and clash against one another, producing mist and spray. They also, of course, yield unequal compliance to the force of the wind, which gives rise to a still greater degree of interference, and passionate gusts sweep of clouds of spray from the groves like that torn from wave-tops in a gale.

– ‑John Muir

Fifteen years have passed since I began photographing Rosemary and David. I have always photographed them simultaneously with my own family. As I began to get deeper into Rosemary and David’s story my grandfather was dying from Alzheimer’s and during my senior year in college, I had to help care for him. The pressures of school, work and care-giving got to be too much, and I had to take a year off from photographing David and Rosemary. When I returned to the project the next year, Rosemary’s brother Silvie was dying. The next few years brought more passing of loved ones and friends for David and Rosemary and for me.

You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness you must be forgiving. It’s a difficult business, being human!

— Wendell Berry

I remember a trip I took to Six Flags Great Adventure with David and Rosemary when he was twenty-five. We spent the whole week together. During intimate, condensed trips like this one, I began to learn more about David and Rosemary. I relished those intense times with them but I also struggled. In those days, David was much healthier and Rosemary had much more energy. Rosemary and I had endless conversations about the existence of God, about our futures, about the passing of loved ones and about how peculiar life can be.

The next few years flew by.

Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?

— Mary Oliver

David has always worn a variety of ribbons on his clothes. I love the way they look-especially their saturaated and worn colors and the way they sound when he moves. He has a different ribbon for every outfit. I asked Rosemary why David wears them and she told me he had beenfascinated with them since he was a toddler. Whenever I look closely at his ribbons, my mind wonders and I begin thinking of things I use to do as a child. No matter how far my mind drifts the ribbon’s evoke feelings deeper than my childhood memories. I become intensely aware of my surroundings and how difficult and fleeting they can be. As I observe and photograph David and Rosemary, my life is deeply affected.

Our guide, a jolly, rollicking Italian, led us into the heart of the hill, up and down, right and left, from chamber to chamber more and more magnificent, all a-glitter like a glacier cave with icicle-like stalactites and stalagmites combined in forms of indescribable beauty. We were shown one large room that was occasionally used as a dancing-hall; another that was used as a chapel, with natural pulpit and crosses and pews, sermons in every stone, where a priest had said mass. Mass-saying is not so generally developed in connection with natural wonders as dancing. One of the first conceits excited by the giant Sequoias was to cut one of them down and dance on its stump. We have also seen dancing in the spray of Niagara; dancing in the famous Bower Cave above Coulterville; and nowhere have I seen so much dancing as in Yosemite. A dance on the inaccessible South Dome would likely follow the making of an easy way to the top of it.

It was delightful to witness here the infinite deliberation of Nature, and the simplicity of her methods in the production of such mighty results, such perfect repose combined with restless enthusiastic energy. Though cold and bloodless as a landscape

of polar ice, building was going on in the dark with incessant activity. The archways and ceilings were everywhere hung with down-growing crystals, like inverted groves of leafless saplings, some of them large, others delicately attenuated, each tipped with a single drop of water, like the terminal bud of a pine-tree. The only appreciable sounds were the dripping and tinkling of water falling into pools or faintly plashing on the crystal floors.

In some places the crystal decorations are arranged in graceful flowing folds deeply plicated like stiff silken drapery. In others straight lines of the ordinary stalactite forms are combined with reference to size and tone in a regularly graduated system like the strings of a harp with musical tones corresponding thereto; and on these stone harps we played by striking the crystal strings with a stick. The delicious liquid tones they gave forth seemed perfectly divine as they sweetly whispered and wavered through the majestic halls and died away in faintest cadence, the music of fairy-land.

— John Muir

Along the rivers there is a strip of bottom-land, countersunk beneath the general level, and wider toward the foot-hills, where magnificent oaks, from three to eight feet in diameter, cast grateful masses of shade over the open, prairie-like levels. And close along the water’s edge there was a fine jungle of tropical luxuri-ance, composed of wild-rose and bramble bushes and a great variety of climbing vines, wreath-ing and interlacing the branches and trunks of willows and alders, and swinging across from sum-mit to summit in heavy festoons. Here the wild bees reveled in fresh bloom long after the flowers of the drier plain had withered and gone to seed. And in mid-

summer, when the “blackberries” were ripe, the Indians came from the mountains to feast—men, women, and babies in long, noisy trains, often joined by the farmers of the neighborhood, who gathered this wild fruit with commendable appreciation of its superior flavor, while their home orchards were full of ripe peaches, apricots, nectarines, and figs, and their vineyards were laden with grapes. But, though these luxuri-ant, shaggy river-beds were thus distinct from the smooth, treeless plain, they made no heavy divid-ing lines in general views. The whole appeared as one continu-ous sheet of bloom bounded only by the mountains. — John Muir

I love listening to my mother talk with Rosemary. They speak a language I don’t comprehend. They share stories of child birth, for instance, how I weighed ten pounds when I was born. I also hear their love for David and me and their fear of losing a child. I always wonder when my mother will stop worrying about me, but their conversations remind me that she will never stop.

Copyright © 2014 by Linda Smith

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