• She runs with him, not sightseeing yet all-seeing. Her mother stands on the large porch, between two glass frame doors and large cylindrical windows, of their Victorian house. Not a widow but something dangerously close. Her girl runs and thinks all is hers – the puppy that runs with her, the house, the boy, her mother. She is happy. I don’t really notice at first; the insurmountable happiness, that is. No, I don’t notice, not really. She runs around with her only brother. Jeremiah, his name is. I sit and I watch them play. They ride on their red bikes and miniature blue cars.
    tab The distance in between is great enough for me to remain unnoticed. Yet still I hide in the weeping willow, though not to weep with it. It is my support, my cover, my sanctuary. The willow weeps always, but I, never. No one wished for my tears; they did not even ask for my sympathy. I know that their happiness is not ever-lasting, and for what is to come, I am prepared. I am prepared for them, even if this isn’t something they’ve asked for either. I watch as Madeleine falls, whimpers, and is picked back up again. Her little brother is truly a big one.
    tab I pull out my camera because this is the typical routine. I smile to myself, wondering what I will someday mean to them. I cannot zoom in, so I leaned forward, through all the nature the saddened tree covers me with, and I find them both. One snap, two snaps, three snaps. I captured unmoving memories with the tip of my finger – like magic. In all the pictures she and her brother are smiling, laughing, and sharing happiness through giddy summer air.
    tab I reel the wheel back once more, looking down to the friend I’d brought. The camera is a cheap one. It is formed of hard black plastic and adorned with yellow, decorative paper. On this paper I find instructions. Reel, snap, reel. I follow them as I repeat the monotonous mantra in my head. The numbers slowly go down. I snap in time to get a shot of Jeremiah wailing on the grass, his precious toy stolen from him.
    tab Reel, snap, reel.


    It seems age has caught up with the old Victorian house. The yellow paint peels off its paneled walls almost eagerly. Fall and winter and spring have come and passed, many times. I know all of this as I look up to the white door just a few steps away from my safe spot on the walkway.
    tab I have the old picture book in my hands. It seems time has bitten the dust in its chase for this special book. It holds in it solid memories. Some are so vivid they appear to be moving in their two-dimensional restraints. I can feel the emotional weight this book carries in my bare, still hands. Life in its material form.
    tab I remember my Auntie asking me who I had done this for. How was I being repaid? I remember smiling at her knowingly.
    tab “It’s like a record – like a journal – in the form of pictures. Years from now little Madeleine and Jeremiah won’t have their great fisher-price cars or toddler bikes. They’ll have work and stress and memories they don’t have time to remember. Would you want to lose an ancient, joyful, free everything in exchange for another, newer, harder everything? Don’t you wish you had something you could look back on, smile at, to remember things you’d forgotten? Or to learn things about yourself you’ve never even known?”
    tab “Dear, Madeleine and Jeremiah’s parents will do that. I’m sure they have photo albums and family portraits to remember these things.”
    tab “But Auntie… They aren’t so real. Where is the true happiness in a picture where you smile because you are ordered to? A portrait is merely a pose, a smile that is automatic because that’s all you know. You aren’t smiling from happiness Auntie. It is… It is your duty to smile. One day, Jeremiah will love this picture of a younger him bawling like a baby because his sister stole his favorite toy. You can’t appreciate a portrait like you can a real photo. Isn’t that right, Auntie?”
    tab She smiled and put a loving hand to my head.
    tab “A clever one you are, sweet thinker.”
    tab I grin at the memory, and suddenly I am standing in front of the door. I take my chance and knock. There is scarce time for me to wait. The door pulls open and a friendly old woman joins me on her porch. She asks me what I need. I hand her the album, the book, and I see the weight that it puts in her fragile arms.
    tab Her eyebrows furrow, yet not unhappily, at the thick book, so very filled with life, and she fails to notice that I am turning away. I begin to walk, and I do not hear any voice calling me, so I keep my pace steady. She opens the book – I hear the shift of plastic. She remains voiceless, staring into the pages of her children… her children and a much younger version of herself; from a time where she was not a lonely grandmother but a busy mother.
    tab “Thirty years…”
    tab She mumbles this on her own, her voiced filled with wonder.
    tab I don’t hear it; I am already gone. Down the road, the willow still weeps.
    tab “Thank you.”