365 Project Day 11: Heart Letters

Canon 5D Mark 2, 50 1.2L , 1.2 aperture, 1/200 shutter, 320 ISO

I took several images of this set up today, but I chose this one for the way it made me feel. I didn’t want a literal image, but one that expressed the color and depth of what was happening.

One of my goals for this year is to write more handwritten letters. I believe letter writing is a bit of lost art, and I want to change that in my world. The first person I want to write to is my dad. He lives 500 miles from me and doesn’t enjoy phone conversations. I don’t want to write about anything life-changing. I just want to tell him about my comings and goings, about  the daily occurrences in my life, as if he were right next door.  Those tiny threads that sew our hearts tighter, and help us to imagine each other’s world when we cannot physically be there.

I want tell him how I scattered seed in the snow today and the birds came as if invited to a party. How the black birds came first and bullied the rest away, but flew away like a cloud when I opened the door to go to the barn. He loves to feed the birds. I want to tell him about the snowball fight the kids had the week after Christmas, and the games we played in our den.  These things are lost somehow in phone conversations, and he doesn’t read my blog as he is not computer-savvy. What’s a girl to do?

Write her daddy letters, that’s what.

To do this requires being present in my own life in order to share it with him or anyone else. I am ordering prints of all the photographs of our experiences this winter, and I plan to send him a few with each letter. Even photos of the little things. It’s the nuances that are missing when people live far away. He knows Katie graduated from college in December, but does he know how her happy brown eyes sparkled as she came out of the auditorium? I  was there and I have photographs to share with him. I can and I will.

I want to send sunshine to him in an envelope. He always called me Mary Sunshine. It’s time to shine.