She called me from Love’s truck stop. We wound up in a retired postal worker’s field of donkeys. And that’s what happened on an afternoon in Texas.

A very long time ago I was a photography student at Western Kentucky University. I met a teacher named Dave Labelle. This teacher taught me of compassion and composition. He taught me to tell stories about people. He challenged every notion I held about anything at all. He taught me to show in pictures what I heard in my heart. He endlessly irritated me with ruthlessly kind and honest critiques. He believed in me when I did not. He taught me of passion and gentleness, to honor love in all the faces of humanity. An image was nothing, no matter how tasty and flashy, until it touched this place of universal remembering, this place called heart.

I graduated. He moved. We lost touch. Fast forward…2o years later to a hotel lobby in Nashville. We met again.

photograph by Neil Cowley

I played with how I see.

Do I focus on the flakes and watch each in sharp relief? Do I look beyond them and feel them blur into me, like an ever washing tide? I am woozy in the blanket swirl, reminded of a baby curl cowlick…I poke my nose outside and smell as they touch the ground, each making way for the other, each changed by the next and the one before. I remember more as I see the photographs…laughter, blue snow light and a neatly  hurled snowball in my lens. ~ Amy

I am feeling particularly nostalgic this evening…

Maybe it’s the snow and the soft cloudy days nestling me…

Maybe it’s my delayed reaction to a new year, a chance to trace my time and reorient my compass…

Maybe I’m savoring a sense of completion…

Maybe and most likely, I’m simply grateful.

I hear my husband and my son bantering in the next room, snippets of laughter and ever~so~earnest questions waft like the chocolate chip cookies I baked. Homework is done. Folded laundry rests. Neat white reminder bundles stack on the stairs. And the slideshow below…it rests, at home on this journal, complete.

Shadow and Grace chronicles 22 years of my photography. It starts with the first worth~a~darn photograph I made as a student in Kentucky. It ends exactly this time last year after my husband received his new kidney. What you might want to know before viewing this lengthy piece it this…some find the content challenging. I offer a very personal no~holds~barred collection of photographs. I trace time by revisiting my years at newspapers, my challenges of coping with my now 14-year-old son’s Cowden Syndrome, my husband’s Polycystic Kidney Disease and running a small business. Some folks have asked how I photographed my family, particularly my son’s early years. My answer? I knew then and know now, one day these images would be needed for him to trace his time.

What I see now, a year later, are beautiful laundry piles on the same steps lulled by the gentle snores of my family.

love ~ amy

{ music: courtesy of Triple Scoop Music }

I wrote about the Foundation Workshop a year ago when I attended as a team leader. Heading to Dallas is somewhat of a yearly pilgrimage. Tomorrow I head back to Texas and meet a new team of photographers.

The five day photography immersion experience started by Huy Nguyen, former Dallas Morning News photojournalist, is devoted to teaching wedding photographers to be better visual storytellers by former news photographers Greg Gibson, David Murray, Brooks Whittington and Tyler Wirken.

I am again blessed with another powerful group. Each is an amazing photographer with incredible gifts. I am so excited to hunker down in Texas and live pictures with my photography family. The 2010 Team Amy includes Britt Bailey, Bonnie Barry, Gulnara Samoilova, Emmy Sherman, Tina Wilson and Tak Yi Young with mentoring by Rachel LaCour Neisen, Huy Nguyen and Jay Premack.

The slideshow below is from the 2009 workshop, re-edited for a presentation for my 2010 Digital Wedding Forum Conference presentation in Nashville. Thank you to 2009 participants Britt Bailey, Marcin Czech, Erin Beach, Daniel Chinn and Scott Williams, Jay Premack, Sergio Lopez, Anja Schlein and David Murray.

Hello new beautiful team. Let’s rock Texas.

love ~ amy

{ note: special thanks to Triple Scoop Music }

Each night we choose our blessing style, a song, take-turns spoken grace or silence. Tonight we choose a song. They sing low. I sing high. We bless the sunshine and the rain, the green beans and the french fries, the many hands that picked our vegetables, the earth that held them, the cow we grilled, the journey of the folks who brought our food to the grocery.

The dogs lay on the deck in a sunset slice. We place napkins in our laps.

“Do you know what would make my life complete?” our 13-year-old son asks.

My husband peeps over his glasses. My green bean fork u-turns and rests on my plate.

“What would that be?” I ask.

“A chimp with buck teeth,” he answers.

I hear a bird symphony. My eyes blink. Four eyebrows raise. I forget about my green beans.

“So Mom… what would make your life complete? he asks.

I experience a very long moment. The answer comes. “World peace,” I say.

“An end to hunger,” his father says.

“Hmm…good answers,” he pipes.

“Oh and one more thing,” he adds. “I also need a robotic ant.”

Laugh lines deepen. Knives and forks point to three o’clock. The dogs race to discover leftover treasures in the summer grass.

Victoria’s Sour Cherry Cobbler Recipe

8 T melted butter
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 T vanilla
2.5 cups white flour
1.5 cups sugar
1 T baking powder
.5 t salt

4 cups sour cherries
2 T flour
.5 cup sugar

Mix the first 4 ingredients together. Sift together the dry ingredients. Mix the wet and dry together to make the topping batter. Add flour and sugar to the cherry mixture.
Pour cherry concoction into a greased 9×12 pan. Spoon topping batter over the cherries. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes. Note: a cup of rhubarb may be substituted for a cup of cherries.

adapted from In a Cajun Kitchen by Terri Pischoff Wuerthner

Miss Jenny Wren fluffs her feathers. She hunkers down. She makes a home. Four tiny eggs nestle within the curve of the wreath on my studio door. Her soft belly coaxes four new lives. She has knitted with twigs and stray string scraps. She has created a refuge tucked under the words faith, hope and love.

Miss Jenny is me.

Miss Jenny reminds me to peep out of my studio and let you know I too have eggs in the incubator. I’m darn tooting excited as I create a studio you can call your photography home. First, I do hereby solemnly declare, by Miss Jenny Wren and all avian powers that be, to regularly post on this blog. Second, I duly promise to post more pictures and less complete sentences. Third, as I wiggle my blogging tail feathers, I’ll may ask you for ideas and invite guest writers. Fourth, I will create an idea guide for the many artists you might consider for your event. Lastly, on my honor I will do my best to…keep you informed of additions including my blossoming portrait garden, new principle photographers and community photography events.

Perhaps Miss Jenny is an angel wearing a bird suit as her disguise and perhaps, Jenny is just a bird. I choose to believe she’s the former.

love,
amy

It’s a picture of my sister and me in 1971. This pictures tickles my memory. There we are in Kentucky, freshly groomed ponies, hand me down boots, noisy corduroy pants, a bit short in the leg and stride, posing with our dear friends.

I am led to seek respite from all tidying fantasies. Pondering begins. This leads to another treasure, an old essay about going and coming home. And that leads to this…my foray into writing, an essay’s 21st century resurrection and very happy dust bunnies.

See that field? That’s where my mom practiced her elephant girl stunts at her father’s amusement park.

I want to smell the alfalfa, watch deer down by the river, and have wiener roast on the hill overlooking my hometown’s red, white and blue flag water tower. I want to see my family. I want my son to know parts of himself through his cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. I want him to see pieces of my life, pieces shaping him.

There was a safe place behind a rickety barbed wire fence where my sister and I hid from an angry heifer when we patted her calf. I want to dodge the fluffy purple-topped thistles and cow pies and kick rocks on the gravel road that leads to the barn. And remember my chestnut filly, put to sleep after she re-broke her leg. Her plaster cast had just been removed. She took great gulps of air and held her breath. I didn’t understand. Then she was still.

I sort of had a storybook childhood, in a vexing perplexing Southern Gothic kind of way. My grandparents owned an amusement park with a campground, NHRA racetrack, old zoo and water slide park. It was a 20 minute pony ride from our farm.

My county vet father would often trade a distemper shot for baby chicks. And once he got a pig and a fluffy fake fur coat from a farmer who was too poor to pay for his cows’ vaccinations. He got Mason jars of moonshine and an assortment of wounded animals. Little Screech, the owl, flew around our house surprising us with her accurate divebombs . We nursed a three-legged fawn back to health. A fox lived in the fireplace.

I remember Sweet Charlotte. My parents raised her when my dad was in vet school. Charlotte was a baby lion cub. When she started batting my sister, we put her in the zoo. She died a few years later. It was for the best. She lived in a small cage. Maybe that’s why Sam, the chimpanzee, chomped off my grandfather’s thumb. Maybe that’s why Sam was so angry, a small cage.

One day Sam got loose in my grandparent’s house and terrorized my grandmother and Mrs. Rabold, her interior decorator. They barricaded themselves in a room until Sam was captured.

I loved Mrs. Rabold. She always gave me Rolaids as a treat. Mrs. Rabold used to love our family stories. She loved tales about the motorcycle gangs; how they tried to burn down the midway; how my mom convinced the Hell’s Angels to be erstwhile policemen; how my grandfather paid them with a truckload of Budweiser.

When I was 18 our house burned. The park was sold to Ronnie Milsap, a country singer, who promptly declared bankruptcy. My parents waited 15 years before visiting the park again. It was a mile away. When I visited I talked my parents into touring the old stomping grounds.

I’m going back to show my husband and my son a cherry tree planted in the campground when my Mom was born. The park has re-opened and instead of a dime each for admission. It costs $15 a carload. We pay to enter.

The Milsap clan had sold the Tilt-A-Whirl, and the hand carved wooden carousel horses, the Wild Mouse roller coaster, the Matterhorn, King-O-Slide, bumper cars and trampolines. A parking lot replaced the roller skating rink, dance pavilion and the stage. I remembered my grandfather drawing a winning ticket and giving the winner a wheelbarrow of pennies.

I remembered a stultifyingly hot day. I was dressed in a 20-pound fur chipmunk outfit with a beady eyed headdress. My job was to entertain the visitors without speaking. Often I sat in the walk-in corn dog freezer trying to rehydrate and regain my wits. All the years of stamping paid on the arms of the Hell’s Angels, inventorying chocolate nutty bananas, cotton-candy sticks and pork butts began slipping away.

Pete, the 30-year-old white mule got hit by lightening. Purnell, the baby possum got stuck under the dryer. Mike, the palomino who won “Warren County Barrel Champion” with my mom on board, got bad feet and died too. Our dog Cephas died in the fire. Louise Butler, the family white-tailed deer, grew antlers and became Louie. Heathcliff, the fireplace fox, found Mrs. Heathcliff. Dad sold my horse and his animal hospital.

I want to see if I can still hear my grandmother’s voice streaming from speakers mounted on the roof of  her powder blue Grand Torino. She drove through the park announcing her Bible classes. She would gather folks together and begin her ministry. A flannel board with felt biblical characters was her medium.

My grandmother could also be found in the town square accompanied by an eager parolee. They would stand, side by side, politely handing out Bible tracts to afternoon shoppers. Her mission was saving people. She sent Bible lessons to most prisoners in the county jail and said she sent one to Omar Khadafi.

Each lesson contained a quiz. She would affix sparkly silver foil stars after giving each lesson a grade. Then she add a few personal comments in calligraphic penmanship asking if they had a job and enough food. Certificates with big gold seals were awarded upon completion. Many of her graduates became employees at the amusement park. I never completed my lessons.

My grandfather didn’t care too much for the whole speakerphones on top of the Grand Torino philosophy. As my grandmother prayed fervently at dinner, my grandfather slurped his crumbled beaten biscuits out of a saucer of hot milk with equal gusto.

I want my son to see the field where my father lassoed some runaway buffaloes. He sat on the hood of his truck. My mother drove. My father hooted and hollered as we bounced over rutted cattle trails.

I want to drive down a lane in my dad’s pickup, hook my arms over the window and smell honeysuckle. The last time I did that I was 5 years old and the door swung open. I found myself suspended over the road. Without a hitch in his giddyup, my dad asked me to get back into the truck.

I want to go back to the our secret hiding place.  The place my sister and I found in the woods by the falling down cabin. There we were cowboys. Our names were Bob and Jim. And my grandfather, well, he would slurp his biscuits if he were still alive, look at my son, smile and just might say, “My, my, my.”

I returned to my hometown a few months ago. I found home was with me, Amy