Back in 1999, my ex and I drove up to Judy Taylor’s first house on the lake. I wanted to take photographs of not only her place, but also the area around it, the roads there and back, and of her church in Bobcaygeon. I don’t remember what I intended to use the photographs for, whether to help me visualize the scene when I wrote about it or to use them on the website or for some other purpose, but they lay in my office, untouched, unused for years and years after a couple of drivers banged my dreams into smithereens.
When I came to write Lifeliner, it took all of my energy to write it, and I had nothing left over to incorporate the use of photographs. I had had some scanned in to the computer in the mid-1990s and managed to upload those to my website, but these ones of Judy’s place were beyond both my ability and my finances to scan in. And so they continued to lie there, unused, but not unwanted.
Then a couple of days ago, I snapped. I took many, many photos with my Minolta for 15 years, up until 2000, photos that evoke memories of loss, loss of who I was and the way I saw things, but photos also that are good, that earned the right to exist way back when and thus to exist now. I have neither the energy nor the inclination to haul my binders full of negatives and slides to stores or the places of people who have scanners, so I suddenly impulse shopped (but did not impulse choose; my eyes still hurt from all the reviews I read) and bought a photo/film scanner for myself. It must’ve been ordained because it was on sale and it arrived early.
I tested my new toy with those old, neglected photos of my journey to and from Judy’s first house, and I invite you to enjoy a slideshow journey down Judy Taylor’s lane. Just click on the slideshow icon to begin.
