Looking at Me

Dear Will:

A forgotten stack of photos contained these from your camera, when you were still taking pictures. These are you looking at me when I wasn't aware, like the wonerful France raincoat picture and so unlike my psed pictures. I felt your live for me when i saw the photo with the cat. I miss you but feel your presence.   

The first, a picture of me petting a cat, is from our wonderful trip to Russia.  Both the University of Chicago, your old school, and the University of Utah offered a special trip that year with the onboard presence of a famous writer about Russia, with a recent best seller. I learned last year that we were part of Torstein Hagen's second year of Viking Tours.  Just his second year!  If you were still here and still well, you'd be pleased because that would make us special.

Sadly, part of that specialness was that the boat started running out of food toward in the last couple of days.

But what fun that trip was. We were great travel companions. And you were the talkative one and I was the quiet one.  The English couple we visited on the Devon coast the following year. She, at least, is still alive.  Maybe they both are.  I got a Christmas card.

I'm sad that I felt so often that I wasn't important to you.  I'm sad that I didn't really understand you.

But I'm happy that somehow we worked it out, in spite of it all. And travel, in spite of its challenges, was always good for us, once I stepped up to be in charge.

And now I'm just in charge of myself!  I mean, once I've ditched the furpals.

This is a picture from our silly and wonderful trip to France. Even though that one set of kids were terrrrible and a couple of time you and I got on each other's nerves, it was really quite wonderful, with that week in Paris on our own.

 

At first I thought this was a picture of our yard in Bend, but as i look more closely I can see that it is elsewhere.  But still woodsy. It sure looks like Bend.  But I find it among travel photos.  And it's taken from a height. And when did I get that tiny camera? Could this be Ashland?

France again

Somewhere in England?