Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real

The very nice ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter do a link-up on Thursdays called Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real, in which they invite other bloggers to post a photo for each category to help “capture the context of everyday life,” a goal I wholeheartedly endorse.  Go there to see what’s Pretty, Happy, Funny, and Real in others’ lives — you can join in, if you like — and scroll down to see some context of my everyday life as it is now:

Our son, Samuel, took this a few days ago. He has been really growing as a photographer and thinks he would like to use his skill in his future career in emergency management. That makes this photo not only pretty, but happy, too, but then, isn’t life a mishmash like that?

These are three VERY happy people, standing in front of the object of their collective attention for most of October and into November. We call it The Great Wall of Privacy, and it was lovingly built by my dad, Wilson Legg, with the eager-but-decidedly-less-skilled labor of all the rest of us. Its purpose is to give us a more pleasant atmosphere for al fresco dining at our picnic tables and for marshmallow-scorching sessions around our firepit. It works. And, how did I get the blessing of being related to two such giving people? Building walls is the least of the ways they serve every day.

This is funny with an explanation: When Samuel and his older brother were about five and seven, their Aunt Trudi got herself married. Her wedding was outdoors, intimate, and fun. She and her groom passed out disposable cameras to the kids and told them to have at it as the wedding photographers. When the film was developed, almost all of Samuel’s photos of people were of their legs — he’d taken the shots at his eye level. We were laughing about that out by the brick wall, and apparently he decided to sneak in a few at his old skill level to surprise his mom.

The day after the wall was completed, Samuel and I took the day off school and headed toward Washington, DC so he could get some serious driving minutes logged toward taking his driver’s test. We went to Brookside Gardens in Montgomery County, MD, a place I have wanted to visit for several years, a place of excellent design, beauty, and serenity. We only had about one hour available to spend there, and there was clearly more than an hour’s worth of looking to be done, and to top it off, my mom called me on my cell and I basically spent my whole hour wandering around the grounds while we discussed the merits of various refurbished Mac Air laptops. Despite all of my dearly held beliefs about being in the moment, absorbing the life around me NOW, and blah, blah, blah, I did this. And you know what? It was still lovely. It was so lovely I took Mom and Dad there three days later to be in the moment again and absorb it before the autumn leaves were gone. Both days were real. Both days had their blessings. And, hasn’t Samuel come a long way from taking photos of people’s knees?