Ilse Griffin

UP-CLOSE

My mother takes up-close photos of fruit, flowers, and other small items from different places she has traveled to, and up they go on the blank white walls of the new apartment that has never housed her children besides as visitors. The photos go in arrangements—memory bouquets —so that Guatemala becomes represented by a handful of multi-colored corn kernels, a splash of pink flowers, a portrait of several uneven cobblestones. Her memory bouquet of Yellowstone includes the nose of a bison, a single tree branch laden with snow, the threads of a snowshoe. China is: three steaming dumplings, several boughs of cherry blossom trees, an inexplicable cat paw. These are not easy landscape photographs snapped half-heartedly; they require something of both the photographer and the viewer, a sort of willingness and wish to get close and pay attention. They are different from the breezy photos she took when she was a busy mother of young ones. 

Photo by Michelle Calderon on Unsplash

I was the last to go, the final child to empty my childhood bedroom of detritus, to become a visitor during the holidays. I noticed these artsy, zoomed-in photos starting to appear during my last years of high school; even then, in our old townhome, the walls had begun to echo with a new kind of emptiness with all my siblings gone. Around that same time, my mother began experimenting with other aristocratic pastimes as she tentatively took steps back from being the mother of children and transitioned into being the mother of adults. During my freshman year of college, a harp (a harp!) appeared in her bedroom—so large, elegant, like a rare or endangered species: a sleeping swan crystallized into wood and string. I tiptoed around it when home during winter breaks. Walking past her room in the evenings when she practiced, I’d catch the almost unbearably intimate sight of her leaning close into the instrument, almost as an embrace. Also to appear: complicated-looking flowers like Orchids that seemed to have multiple pre-existing health conditions and complex needs. They all resentfully crowded together in a sunny corner of her bedroom; they were frequently dying or requiring resuscitation due to receiving slightly more or less sun or water than they needed. The harp too, required a sort of dogmatic accuracy, it being a needy, asthmatic instrument that was prone to emitting dramatic strangled death cries when not played precisely. 

Even her old hobbies like cooking now were completely different; as the mother of four growing children, she had served a lot of low-maintenance meals like spaghetti with red sauce. Now, she spent hours frowning over New York Times recipes and then a staggering amount of time shopping, preparing and cooking; our meals became multilingual and ornate, requiring ingredients like Saffron, pozole, white truffle oil. All these new, demanding hobbies. I looked around at the mothers of my peers, wondering if they too were hiding their budding interests in Chinese calligraphy or physics, or if they were just going to the gym and dyeing their hair more in the sudden absence of their own previously full nests. 

What was it about me and my siblings that logically led to these complicated and highly-specific hobbies that demanded such close attention? Had that energy been hiding, coiled inside of her for the past few decades, just waiting to emerge, waiting for the drudgery of the soccer games to wane and the school conferences to dwindle? Were we not complicated enough—were we always a little distant?,—or were we too finicky, requiring an acute level of focused care that she now found hard to transition away from? Had we warmed her up for such pursuits or was she seeking the opposite of what we had provided? Had I been an orchid or a cactus? 

Photo by ALFONSO ALBERTO RAMÍREZ ALVAREZ on Unsplash

I watched the vacuum of care that us grown kids left behind become filled with these new pursuits—the hours spent tending to the orchids, talking the harp out of panic attacks; the intricate new meals that required previously unknown verbs—blanching, poaching, pressing — and the succession of new manual cameras that quickly became the focal points of her trips and a trigger for her children. Along with her new interest in up-close photography of animals and objects from her travels came a similar passion for up-close photography of her children. Over the holidays and when up at the family cabin, I’d look over to see the red blinking eye trained on me, the camera whirring as it zoomed in. I’d put down my book, cringing, feeling almost invaded, but later, I’d ask to see the photos, always eager to see my ever-evolving shape in a constantly-changing world. Here too, my mom’s need for closeness was apparent in her continued collection of visual synecdoche of her family: my young adulthood is memorialized through dozens of uncomfortably close pictures of my face—it fills the entire frame, there is no happy softening or smoothing of anything, no distraction of outfits or poses or landscape, no, just my huge face with its stories of imperfections, the me that only I see in the bathroom mirror, that no one but a mother could really love and want to drink in and hang on a beckoning expanse of blank wall. It’s a face that needs repair, tending; slow, sweet, nuanced love; no longer the simple face of a child. 

Photo by Jamie Daykin on Unsplash

I look at these photos and cringe, imagining the love that is bigger than I can imagine, that has to ground itself like lightning into the details of an agoraphobic orchid, a quarrelsome harp, a grown child’s blemished face; a love that has no other wish than to be close.

__________

ILSE GRIFFIN RECEIVED HER BA IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, HER MA IN TESOL/LINGUISTICS FROM HAMLINE UNIVERSITY, AND HER GRADUATE CERTIFICATE IN TEACHING WRITING FROM MANKATO STATE UNIVERSITY. SHE IS A MEDITATION PRACTITIONER, TEACHER, AND YEAR-ROUND BIKE COMMUTER. SHE HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN WHERE IS THE RIVER, FUNNY LOOKING DOG QUARTERLY, PIF MAGAZINE, TALKING STICK, ANTI-HEROIN CHIC, MAYDAY MAGAZINE, MAYDAY MAGAZINE, BENDING GENRES JOURNAL, AND FORTHCOMING IN SPRY LITERARY JOURNAL. SHE LOVES IN ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA.