It’s Sunday morning on the Canadian prairies. As I write up this post, it is still dark with dawn more than an hour away. The temperature outside is -26C, with a wind chill that makes it feel like -38C. Now, that is cold. However, I am toasty warm as I sit in my rocking chair in front of the fireplace writing this post. For those who might be interested, I found this rocking chair in 1976, in a northern community.
The rocker was in a few pieces with broken runners, so the owner sold it to me for only $5. The rocker was old, very old. I repaired the rocker and often think of the old trapper who sold it to me. He died that winter and I was the one who wrote up his memorial as an editorial in the newspaper. Now forty-five years later I am surprised at how it is often the little things that have the most meaning.
I looked back into my photo collection from that time and found photos that tell me that even back then, nudity was a valuable part of my life as a father and husband. It was a time of no social media. The nudity wasn’t taken to be shared with others, but as a record of who we were as a young family. We camped in the northern wilderness beside rivers and lakes, usually finding time to be free of clothing, especially when we were in the water.
The remoteness of our camping experiences, and the sanctity of home meant that there was no outside influences to shutter these moments of pure freedom. There were no, “what if” moments to deal with. The odd photo that was taken was more about a passion for photography as an artist than about documentation. That passion hasn’t gone.
Other than my books of Naked Poetry, an odd photo taken for a photography exhibit in gallery, as well as a collection of three photos above our bed, I have refrained from displaying nude images of my wife. They weren’t taken for public consumption. Those found in the poetry books were taken deliberately for those three books and used with permission.
That’s the thing about waking up in darkness and sitting by a fire – memories, good memories come bubbling to the surface.