On my second sister moving away

a poem scribbled into a journal after saying goodbye, before falling asleep

Sister, I have the
two bottles of wine
intended for you as a gift -
you see I must
see you again
soon, if only to hand off
this wine that your coworker made
at home, with care, left
out on his porch for
me to pick up, a favor
for you on this your last
weekend of living nearby -
a weekend of boxes, travels,
steely resolve that you
will arrive! - one long, long
day and a bit later, more than a
bit tireder, full of apprehension
and hope. I imagine your
dusty cars pulling into that faraway valley,
into that apartment complex where
$2400/month will now get you a three-bedroom.
When I see you next will the hug be as good as the one
I was supposed to get tonight?
Supplanted by an elbow bump to
close out our strangely distant
picnic, with our overly loud voices
trying to travel through these
masks and across the circle
of beach chairs. They say nine feet
for a witches' circle. I say, a circle of mountains
to keep my sisters safe. How will we remember
this time? I hope there's not too much
COVID there for people to be nice to you.
I hope your new neighbors aren't too nice
to wear masks. I will try to send you your first
real piece of mail there -
slim paper housewarming present
to break your Montana mailbox in.
Right now your moving-weekend crankiness
is fresh enough in my mind for me to
feel a little less sad about no more you
at my birthday dinners. Good work,
if you planned that. I still
know your phone number by heart.
I've changed mine a few times since we all
got our first cell phones together in 2007,
 and I'm glad you never stopped
calling. I will try to send you your first
Montana mail. I will try to bring you these bottles of wine soon.

Moving week

My niece and my mother. San Diego, June/July 2012.

My mother on her roof last year

Viewing the annular solar eclipse.

San Francisco, May 2012.

December 26th

December 25th

Breakfast with my sister and my niece

Some time ago, in their old house.

Constellations

Constellations of photographer and subjects, of mothers and a grandmother and a granddaughter and a niece, and sisters and daughters. With a spring sun glancing off the Pacific.

The twenty-third cake

This was my birthday cake. I baked it. My mother frosted it. I far prefer the look and taste of imperfect, homemade-from-scratch layer cakes. Lumpily adorable.

Wind and unwind

Hot tea and hot sake

Niece, Lahaina

Younger sister, Kaanapali

Whales, Lahaina

See the tail, way out and on the edge of the light leak?
Niece-Baby was not a fan of her life jacket...





Padre sitting on the front of the boat waiting for the next shot.
Do you see the white under the water, looking turquoise through the water?
That's its gorgeous fin, and the white on its body.

Shave ice, Kihei

Buckets and a small daughter, Kaanapali

Strip mall

In January, we are all going back to Maui together: swimming in the ocean + TEN DAYS with these dears.

Playing / kiss

These are from October. My sister and her daughter. It never felt weird to say that she was expecting a baby, but thinking that she was going to be a mother did. It still surprises me when I phrase it that way to myself.

I find them fascinating in stills — it makes me notice the way they relate to each other, the faint human electricity that you find between people who are really close to each other. The force of their mutual awareness. In their attention, the opening and closing of space between them, their eyes — and they in particular have spent so long in each other's company, with one of them still mostly wordless...

Sister and sea, before dinner

Sea air

Three stories about moonlight

ONE.
My father's father and mother were young and newly married. He was still a med student; she was working to support him and they didn't have much money, but they needed a car and so had just bought their first. It was some shade of not-quite-pink (coral?) and had a glass top. They decided quite spontaneously to visit her parents for dinner that night, a few hours away. After dinner, they packed up all the leftovers to take with them so they wouldn't have to buy groceries for another week or so, and on their way back they watched the full moon rise through the roof of their car.

TWO.
The grandmother of the boy who told this story to an auditorium of us his peers. She, like him, was born deaf, and in her time that meant you got taken away to a boarding school where you were forbidden to use sign language. But when the moon was bright enough, the girls in the dormitory would creep from their beds at night and sit in a circle by the windows signing to each other by its light. Once they were caught. She made it back to her bed in time, but a friend of hers didn't. She watched a school administrator strike her friend so hard that she fell and hit her head, and they took her away with her head bleeding. She didn't see her again.

THREE.
When my sisters and I were little, our parents' fail-safe way to soothe us if we got upset too close to bedtime was to fold us up into a ball and wrap a down blanket around us, and then fold that up in their arms and carry us on a slow walk around the block in the dark. I remember the feeling of night air on my face when my cheeks had been hot and sticky from crying. My dad says he'd point to the moon to distract us and we'd talk about where it was in its phases. Sometimes my older sister needed to come too, and I could look up ahead through the quiet and see her in the other parent's arms in the next streetlight.