She opens a drawer and finds dozens of photos taken with her long-ago Instamatic.
Her children, trapped forever by the flesh-bleaching flash, their expressions frozen and stunned, reddened eyes demonic and glowing like coals.
By the time electronic pictures came along she was no longer on speaking terms with any of them.
Years ago her son David sent her an expensive Olympus digital camera.
“But I don’t have a computer,” she wrote in her thank-you card. He never replied.
She learns later how one can take the little cards into a drugstore to have them developed, exactly like film.
Armed with this knowledge, she snaps photos by the score, all of her dog, Wanda, an overweight shelter Labrador who is inordinately fond of snow.
The first snowfall she takes three hundred pictures, but does not make prints.
The little camera cards remind her of her grandmother’s Kodak albums, dozens of 5×7 black and white prints pasted into books of black paper, then shelved and never looked at.
Her digital photographs will never be accidentally discovered in a drawer. They’ll stay safely locked away in their cards, inert and invisible.
She knows they exist, but she doesn’t have to see them.
She knows they exist, but she doesn’t have to see them. What an arresting last line. Apt metaphor of failing and slowly fading away relationships. Brilliant is this story, beautiful are the lines you have strung. Merry Christmas to you and yours, Hardy.
Great atmospheric writing. Happy holidays.