I arrived home late last night from Saskatoon via Bozeman after two long days of winter driving and was washing a dish at the kitchen sink when I looked up to see this image stuck to the wall with a magnet.  I took this photo with my film camera at a take-out after a canoe trip on the Churchill River System of Northern Saskatchewan when I was 21 and Robert was 24.  Two months later, we eloped in Reno, Nevada and the rest is history, as they say.  I mounted the image on card stock and mailed it to Robert at Wheaton College as a postcard when he was a student there and I was still living in Saskatoon attending the University of Saskatchewan.  Rob found it while I was away in a box of things his parents shipped up to us from California and no doubt, it touched him the way it touched me, and so he stuck it up on the wall.  There is a long missive written on the back of this postcard in a tiny, cramped hand.  The words take me back, root me in the present and make me dream about the future.

We were dreamers then.  We are dreamers now.  We never dream small.

Here’s what I think of when I look at this image:

Holy basil.  Robert is a looker.

We were doing things on rivers in wild places, catching fish, living beautiful lives in beautiful spaces at the genesis of our relationship.  We lived this way when we met in New Zealand.  How we make our way through this world has been unchanging.

Even then I was taking portraits of us with my camera and stylistically, my images have the same voice today which FASCINATES me — my images continue to look this way (but better) and my work continues to revolve around nature, portraits in nature, and self-portraiture in holy moments which really assures me that the way I take photos is my own, and always has been.  That feels good.

It is apparent that who we were at 21 and 24 is who we continue to be at 32 and 35.  This is who I want to be, forever.  I want to keep ironing out unpleasant kinks in my personality, keep divorcing the sins of the generations that haunt me (as they do all of us), keep existing courageously in wild spaces with an arm wrapped around my best friend.

And I want to always have a boat.

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To Robert:  I didn’t think I could love you more then.  I don’t think I can love you more than I do now.  Which means I’m sure to love you exponentially more in the future.  Thank you for staying by my side.