a million pebbles

THE MORNING CALIFORNIA SUN IS streaming in over her left shoulder, making her thin gray hair shine a little, gleam, like old pewter newly polished. “Look here,” Marion Post Wolcott says, bringing out some drugstore-developed3 X 5 color snapshots. They’re a little out of focus and perfectly ordinary in composition, the kind you might shoot on a picnic with the family Instamatic. But she seems so proud anyway. “I just took these things through the windshield when we were coming back from Albuquerque a few weeks ago. Lee [her husband] was driving. I guess I was wondering if I could still click the shutter, if could still see light anymore. I mean, all these years I’ve seen things and not really photographed them. Or didn’t bother to. Or didn’t want to. Oh, maybe my cameras were in the back of a closet, or didn’t know where they were at all, or didn’t have any film just then, or had told myself that the film in the camera was too old, just like you are, Marion, forget it, it’s too late. But anyway, on this recent trip, just the two of us coming back through the desert, with Lee driving and me pointing the camera out the window, I decided to try. And what do you know, I found out I could still click the shutter at nearly the right moment.”

from the book Looking For the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott by Paul Hendrickson

© Marion Post Wolcott