It's that point in the summer where it's so hot you stay inside all day and dress in jeans and bible paper thin camisoles and the air is heavy with summer storms then sun then haze then storm. But it clears for sunset almost every night and I'm lured out to the fire escape but sunset is bambi's bedtime so I steal glimpses over her still nursing head and pause a little longer when she says goodbye to the seagull mobile forever gazing at my favorite view. That lucky wooden bird. But not too long because if I hurry through the routine maybe I can catch those glows before they sink between the twin spires that used to mimic two other towers mere blocks away and now stand alone. They were there before and lasted longer and maybe my window is the only one that has this perfect framing view of them. I hope it clears tonight. I hate this thunder. I'm eating a little yellow tomato on top my eggs. I spent a little more for heirlooms... they don't compare to the soft, sweeter than fruit tomatoes from the Port Townsend Food Co-op. It's that point in summer when our trip home to Washington State, that thunderless state, is in the recent past. I'd skip it because a trip is hardly ordinary or empty hours but sitting in a storm darkened room on a summer afternoon looking at photos from a trip is very much an empty hour.

Four other babies just out of frame, splashing in flower filled garish blue wading pool, a line of black clothes drying just behind us (subtly glaring sign of New Yorkers visiting the farm), Sylvia Plath tossed beside us, Adrienne Rich shading my eyes, Gigi's perfect tan (she knows how to farm girl well), my camera at the ready (there's probably a better version of this shot waiting inside it now), the sound of their neighbor shooting (I have a phobia of thunder but I'd rather thunder than gunshots), the shade of one hundred fruit trees (not there but metaphorically)--proven by the taste of every fruit. "It actually smells like fruit. That's how you know it's good" -grandma lew, on the topic of her freshly picked plum.

Pizza in the estuary at change of tide, the omnipresent mountain peering over Vashon Island, a borrowed hat from a six year old niece, a flash of remembrance of how most of Washington is when a group of teenage/twenty year old white KP boys drinking beer under that bridge say loudly and intimately ("sound carries over water" -the constant refrain of my mom on our boat growing up and also they could reach out and touch me), "Ain't no Commies here!" as I paddled by on a borrowed paddleboard. I muttered, "Speak for your fucking self" then remembered my mom's refrain and the last night's gunshots and I was glad the tide was incoming.

I don't miss it. But I can still like that it was (is) my past.

Edit: the film versions :

 Pentax Spotmatic F, Fuji Superia 400 -- a swim in Washington Square Fountain, meeting with bookcart customer at Caffe Reggio, and the walk home from the Brooklyn Bridge 6 train.

These are from my first roll of film... I want to find a film that's better on bambi's skintones. I've been researching all morning. Laying on my bed in jeans and a black cami because the ac is cool enough for that. I'm surrounded by books that need cleaning and pricing and notebooks that need typed up and Susan Sontag's On Photography is propped up next to me... very unhelpful for the actual technical slew of things that I need to learn but beautiful meditation on the who and why of photography.