the other side of me

So my new camera has arrived. Along with it came some inspiration for my writing, so it’s best that I stop the long posts on times past for now and get back to work. It’s fitting that the last of the the “floppy” pictures I post is one of the last ones I took with the infamous Sony Mavica camera.

The summer of 2002, just a few months before B turned three, we took our first serious road trip. I - and I’m not sure how I convinced myself this was a good idea but I think I was high on the “indepedent divorcee” thing - packed up a used Jeep Cherokee that I’d just purchased to replace my 1974 VW Bug and drove from Tucson to Seattle, just me and an almost three year-old Mr. B.

The car over-heated the first day and blew some important pump, but we made it to Ridgecrest, California (the gateway to Death Valley, they say), where I luckily knew a mechanic who fixed my car at cost and got me back on the road. We made it to San Francisco, then Redding, then Portland, and then Seattle without incident (save one of my worst parenting moments in a parking lot in Portland).

We did a lot of great things in Seattle that year. My parents had just sold their house in the suburbs and moved into a fabulous condo downtown. We were walking distance to the market and the aquarium and Ivars and a short bus ride to the Seattle Center and other fun places. We even took a little trip to Snoqualmie Falls “The Island of Sodor” and met Thomas, Sir Top’em Hat, and others of Thomas’s friends. It was a fabulous time.

The last pictures, though, before I dropped the camera, were at the Woodland Park Zoo and this one has always been one of my favorites. I adore this kid and the picture captures many of the reasons he’s so special to me. How could you not love this guy?

Four months after Baedyn was born, we moved from Rock Hill to Tucson. It was only late January and I wasn’t set to start graduate school until the fall, but we decided to get a head start and settle in long before that transition.

The move itself was rough. A snowstorm hit the week we left and made us continuously detour further and further south as we headed westward. I spent most of the ride sitting in the backseat of a 1997 Honda Civic with a carseat, a baby, and a staff. We arrived thinking it would be warm in Tucson (we were wrong) and had no heat or hot water for the first few nights. We had no furniture for the first week. You know those windows that the movers give? Well, for us, February 3rd-9th meant the ninth.

The first night we roughed it on the floor in sleeping bags. The second night we went to a hotel. On the third day we bought an air mattress. Sometime in those first few days we also bought the only other piece of “furniture” we would have until our things arrived - the Super Saucer. It was a life saver!

Well… one really big one.

Only now that it’s beautiful spring outside can I look at this picture of an ice sculpture in Millennium Park and see only its beauty without this thought being drowned out by memories of how damn cold and windy and awful it was the day that Omar and I were there.