An Intricately Printed Blouse, (to lmd)

This morning while cleaning out an overfilled desk drawer I ran across a photograph of her I had taken over forty five years ago. My heart skipped a beat to see her sitting there in the prime of her youth, a fresh and lovely girl comfortable with the burgeoning possibilities of time and the future. She reclined on the bottom step. Although the picture had faded to a sepia monochrome I could sense her green eyes peering into the camera. The unpainted lips tilted with an enigmatic smile and long fingered elegant hands gently folded in her lap like twin birds in a nest. It must have been on the back porch of that dilapidated house I rented my last year in graduate school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She was a girl in her twenties wearing an intricately printed blouse staring out at me from that small faded rectangular Polaroid photograph. Posed in dark shadows against a faded ornate Indian bed cloth draped over a short clothes line attached between two upright posts on the porch she sat, unmoving. The shadows cast from gently waving leaves on an ancient walnut tree played across her face and hands making subtle patterns. In the small dingy window that overlooked the back yard I could see the reflection of a tallish thin young man who stood with his hands wadded up close to his face.

It was uncertain to me at that time whether or not she could actually see into the future. Now I know she could.