Merry Christmas to Me

December 2022

This was Kara’s all-time favorite photo of mine. I’m not 100 % sure why as she never explained - I wish I would have asked. There are some obvious reasons, admittedly it’s an appealing capture of a dramatic landscape. But if you’ve ever been to Smith Rock in person, you know that this is just what the place looks like on any given day at any given time. It’s majestic.

The whole place is a photographer's dreamscape and all you need do is not muck it up. And this particular photo is essentially from the parking area. It’s the first real view you get of that conglomeration of rhyolite tuff and the river that runs through it. Perhaps it was the composition and colors that got her. After all, it would be the perfect complement to the natural wood walls of our home and the viridescent forest that filled the picture frame windows just beyond them. Which I’m guessing is what it was supposed to do.

When we moved into Whiskey Jane and began mutually decorating, this was the photo she wanted to be framed and hung in the living room. Either one of us would mention it from time to time during our Happy Hour rundowns of have-to-do’s and want-to’s. But it never got done. For whatever reason, over the course of our almost four years spent there, I never accomplished that simple task. Let me walk that back - I actually had it printed a few months before the fire but had yet to get it framed. Which only makes it worse.

So as a Christmas gift to myself this year, perhaps to both of us in a way, I had the print remade and framed, and it’s now hanging on the wall in the living room of my new place. However, as I write this, I’m trying to run down all the rationales behind doing that. Unfinished business, tributes, regret, guilt, love, coping, and carrying on.

It’s all swirling around this new cave and my old carcass while I sit here staring at the print. And as visually pleasing as it is, as much as it might tie the room together Lebowski rug-style, at the moment, I don’t know if it was a good idea or not. I also don’t know how many more posthumous promises must be kept before they begin to count. But I’m willing to find out.

Post Script - It still totally ties the room together.