Opinion: Rheta Grimsley Johnson - A life slightly out of focus
A photographer friend, Marc Lamkin, whose specialty is seeing what others don’t, paid a visit here when I was far away and hadn’t been around in months to smooth the covers or weed the beds. It was his idea, and I had to be persuaded. He made me a little book with his photos. I was astounded at what he saw.
Marc missed the permanent burn pile where old pizza boxes and perforated balls from the gum trees and pinecones and broken limbs pile up for months in a soggy sculpture until conditions are right for conflagration.
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He shot over that and captured the prize concrete pig my niece long ago named Wilbur, wildflowers in the foreground, my old barn in the background. I love Wilbur.
He photographed the old doily I hung over the ceiling light in the living room, something I copied from a French postcard and thought softened the box store’s cold features. Hundreds of people have walked beneath that light, almost brushing their heads against the cloth curlicues dangling from the low ceiling. Nobody else ever noticed.
When I bought this place, the kitchen was the largest room in the house. After knocking down a few walls and closing in porches, I’ve created bigger spaces. But the kitchen remains the heart of the house, a constantly evolving room with busy colors and much clutter, no scheme or metered rhyme.
Marc photographed the kitchen in black and white, except for one red chair, the yellow glow of fire in the old wood stove and a few blue and green bottles in the window. He controlled colorful mayhem and produced a tidy shot using primary colors.
The greenhouse was full of pink flowers instead of the rakes and spray bottles and weed-whackers that usually fill it. That was a happy accident, because a green-thumbed neighbor used the building for her considerable flowers this past winter. Marc captured the filtered pink light.
There were other things — the old sign from a failed weekly newspaper that hangs on a wisteria vine, a propane tank painted with sunflowers, the glass eye of my father’s blue marlin, the red bed on the porch, the lion’s head on the arm of an old rocker.
What he did, what makes his work extraordinary, was manage to see my home the way I see my home, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. He even made a cloth mop hanging over the top of the pump house a study in workaday patterns, the straight lines of the metal roof contrasting with the limp mop noodles. I sit at my desk right now and edit out the boxes piled around my feet because this little house lacks storage. I look past the paper shredder and the old undershirt I’m saving for a dust rag and a contraption called a “grabber.” I look over all that and out the picture window to a white rose bush blooming. I keep my life slightly out of focus.
I am adept at ignoring the flaws and seeing potential beauty in this world I’ve created. I do that to live here. “Our homes are like our hometowns,” Marc said when I thanked him. “We can cuss and degrade them, but let someone else do that and we’re all
over them.” I guess he made pictures the way he did to avoid a fight.
RHETA GRIMSLEY JOHNSON’S most recent book is “Hank Hung the Moon ... And Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts.” Comments are welcomed at rhetagrimsley@aol.com.