I spent the afternoon on the park bench at Hester Commune--now that the water is off for the season she doesn't seem to want to dash madly from zone to zone. I rested in a slim book of poetry and she only got stuck and needed rescuing once. I gazed, exhausted from a week of sickness and the emotional labor of weaning (I thought I'd be less tired because of it...) as she and the other kids play wordless games-- though words are being spoken--do they understand each other? Does my child understand Cantonese? Is it Cantonese? or is it Mandarin? I have no idea. I feel guilt for not knowing. I've lived here for four years and have no deep friendships across racial barriers. I also have no deep friendships within racial barriers but I feel like that is a flimsy argument. I find the language barrier peaceful. That's why Hester Commune is both our favorite park. There are always children to play with and fellow moms (and also grandparents, of both genders, which is so lovely... I want that to soak into Margot's psyche. And my own) to nod and smile broadly and laugh to and with and that is all. A deep mutual admiration of children playing together and no discussion of preschools or--I honestly don't know what people talk about. My meds have been so messed up I have not been able to claw my mind free for over a month. But to be honest, I don't think I've ever known that. I speak in cliches on playgrounds and to "peers" because I've never known. Maybe they do the same because of the same. Or maybe they're idiots, as my anxiety riddled body tells me.

Walking home along the street below the bridge, lined with produce stands and baskets of crabs and all of Chinatown buying both, I first think about the chaotic crowd of people who manage to nearly never run into each other. We are all very good at this. Who needs rules of traffic. Our skills surpass rules.

I see the butterfly. It hovers above a precipitous crate of lychee still on the branch or oranges, I can't remember, all I could think about was how huge it was. Do butterflies grow bigger over the course of summers? do they migrate? how long do they live? It's four inch (I have no idea) wings trembling with tentativity. Tremble is inaccurate because it suggests a lack of confidence (also hunger)... it tasted the atmosphere, languidly. Oh God, was it dying?? It wavered here and there, slowly, just above, I wavered in and out of the masses of shoppers, murmuring to bambi to look, look! She looked and looked at whatever she was gazing on before. It flew up and up. How could I still see it? is it even a butterfly? Maybe a bat? But they don't come out till dusk and it was solidly (liquid) golden hour.  No. I know a butterfly's flight. And I know a bat's. How are my eyes this good right now? It wavered unthinking into the car deck of the bridge. I strained for its reappearance. There! Then back again and out of sight. I realize shivers had travelled the course of my body and and buzzed, hovering on the top of my scalp. I scratch my hair roughly. I cross under the bridge, took a photo of the shock of orange sunlight on the corner kiosk. I cross the street, see a sparrow take off from a tree stunted by sound. Was it a sparrow all along?

The bambi's head was just below the frame and I was on my period.
The Starrett House, Port Townsend, Wasington, late July 2019

Pentax Spotmatic F
Kodak Gold 200

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.

A synthetic cherry dress pulled off the goodwill rack in a desperate search for clothes for an uncharacteristic tropical vacation last January. It made Margot pause from her persistent pleads for raisins and gasp, "wooow" in the oddly lit dressing room so I decided that unknown fibers be damned, I want my daughter to think my clothes are cool. When the fire escape gets too hot during naptimes I retreat to just inside the window and it is my room of my own. Was reading: The Color Purple by Alice Walker. I wished it was longer.

note: synthetic cherry dress leads to near nooners as alternate naptime activities when Jesse doesn't have to get to the edit studio till 11.30

Yesterday was thirty years since the Tiananmen Square Massacre. As I looked out my windows, walked to the shop and to the playground I wondered how many of my neighbors are here because of it. 

- 4.06.19 Chinatown, NYC  

Sunday morning, smoothing her curls into layers of barrettes.