of lace and pollyanna

Once upon a time, I used to take photos of the light coming through the lace curtains in the bathroom at my grandma's house. I did the same thing when I first moved to Waupaca with the upstairs window curtains. Something about light shining through lace will always make me nostalgic for the early days of everything when my heart went pitter-patter for a good shadow long before I ever learned how to use a camera to document it. I wasn't even a person yet—and by that I mean, nothing had broken me yet. I can still remember being probably five or six years old and laying on the floor in front of the kitchen windows, watching the long shadows cast through the curtains and the pretty golden light that cast rainbows on the floor thanks to my grandma's prism collection.

Anyone remember the Disney movie Pollyanna from the '60s with Hayley Mills? My grandma and I used to watch it together all the time. It was one of her favorite movies. There's a scene in the movie where Pollyanna and one of her orphan friends go to the neighbor's house and they marvel at his prism collection while he explained the science behind it.

"Let us make a garland and hang them in the window!" they begged.

He conceded and Pollyanna says, "Oh it's gorgeous! It's the most beautiful room in the entire world" while they watch rainbows dance across the walls in awe.

I adopted that same sense of awe laying on the floor of my grandma's kitchen. When I moved out years later, I inherited a small chunk of that prism collection. I hung them in the windows of my office in my first apartment and I used to lay on the carpet, face in the sun like my cats, and stare at the rainbows dancing their way across my brown carpet and white walls. It felt like my own little world—my own little slice of magic in everyday life.

Discovering what it means to be broken for the first time and trying to climb out of that kind of darkness is the hardest hurdle to get over. I used to hide in the bathroom as a teenager when I was feeling too much—school, homework, friends, parents, college, pressure. I would grab my little red Kodak camera and take pictures of the light streaming through the curtains to calm myself down. Something about light and shadow has always had a grounding effect on me.

Later, when MySpace became a thing, I wanted to do something different than just holding the camera at arm's length and click the shutter. I propped my mom's digital camera on the table by the garage, set the self-timer and started twirling in circles. That was really the beginning of my journey into portraiture. Of course my 365 challenge came after that, and I still felt the pull to capture light over people. I was just throwing a human element into the mix. My first "explored" picture on Flickr was of my hands dancing in the sunlight, testing the waters of light and emotion and the capacity of what I could create alone, just me and my camera.

All these years later, I can still feel that same pitter-patter and burst of inspiration when I see good shadows. Dappled sunlight and long shadows will always feel like home to me, mixed in with accidental rainbows and some sun flares for good measure. I will probably always be a geek over light and shadow. It's what pulled me through some of the darkest times in my life after all. I can only hope and pray that the magic of it all will never cease to amaze me. So far, we're on the right track.