experience: Untitled

Andy and I went camping a few days ago-- it was awesome. Photos will be posted by the end of the weekend (ideally)...or actually right now. My favorite part of the trip was Monday morning at 5am. I told Andy I wanted to be awake to watch/photograph the sun rising. He said it was okay if I woke him up, so I did as passively as possible... by opening and closing the zippers on my tent. Surely he would hear that and get up on his own. After zipping and unzipping and getting dressed and ho-humming along, I said "Andy, are you awake" in this really sweet voice. "I am," he said. A few minutes later, we were down on the dock to watch the sun.

Having slept only about 5 hours the night before, we were both pretty tired. I got some good photos, and then fell asleep in my chair. It was perfect. We sat/laid out on the dock for a couple of hours before packing up and heading home. It was quiet, and beautiful. Before we left, I told Andy I needed to go say goodbye to the lake. I shuffled down the home made stairs built into the ground by the cabin, and I stopped at the "beach." I looked to the left where my gramma's walking path was. I had a picture of that path from several years ago, with the sun shining through the trees-- I always felt like my gramma was the sun in that picture. On Sunday I had tried to recreate that photo to no avail. When I looked at the path from the beach on Monday morning, the sun was shining like it had years ago. A perfect photo opportunity, I thought to myself. But like I had said the day before-- I don't need to recreate the past. I need to just enjoy the present for what it is.

I walked to the end of the dock and looked out at the lake. It was beautiful, as it always is. The sun was high in the sky by then, and so I looked directly at it and took a deep breath in. The wind was blowing, not too hard, providing a comforting breeze. "Thank you," I said as I looked back across the lake. "I miss you guys," I said to the sky, feeling the energy and love of my grandparents. "And I love you." I don't know that I believe in prayer or god very strongly, but I put my hands in prayer position and slightly bowed forward. "Thank you," I said again.

I turned back towards the cabin and walked up to the car. "Okay, I'm ready to go," I told Andy. And I was.