Sunday afternoon in the park
October 23, 2006 at 4:06 Hundreds of photos of the residents of Chez V.
That’s what my blogger friend Di is facing this morning.
Di, a New Zealand expat living in Antwerp, Belgium, is launching a photography business after enduring the endless bureaucracy and delays of the residency permit and the professional licensing process here. Last week she sent me an e-mail, asking if my family would be willing to be photographed so she could add a group portrait to her portfolio.
I’ve long admired Di’s work and jumped at the opportunity. My children have been photographed endlessly, but E and I haven’t been professionally photographed since 1992 and we’ve never had a family portrait done. To catch what may be the last bit of nice weather for a long while, we scheduled the shoot for 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon at a large park near our home.
Our weekend was crazy. E-Grrrl had a soccer game on Saturday morning, and E got caught in an enormous traffic jam. More than 45 minutes after leaving the house, they still hadn’t made it to the playing field, so E just turned around and came home. We’d set aside Saturday afternoon for a marathon shopping session at the nearest commissary and PX, which is more than an hour away. Our son, A, needed a haircut before the shoot, so that was on the agenda as well. We got home late, and Sunday morning came early. The kids had acolyte training and Sunday school as well as church, followed by a school carnival and then the photo shoot. We were on a tight schedule.
After the carnival, I put on makeup and got dressed in a mad rush, slicked down my son’s hair and argued about the shirt he wanted to wear, threw a bunch of props in a shopping bag and rushed off to the park to meet Di and her husband Gert.
Tightly wound up from a busy weekend and excitement, I slowly inhaled, exhaled, and tried to relax. Sometimes the harder you try to relax, the harder it is to relax.
This was the first time I’d met Di. I’ve been reading her blog for close to a year now. We wandered through the park getting to know one another as E-Grrrl chattered about everything while carrying her favorite porcelain doll in a basket, "A" looked for the irresistible combination of sticks and water, and E and Gert followed along. We enjoyed a number of green and shady places, next to gardens and ponds and in the woods.
The children posed among pine needles and pumpkins, peeking out of a stand of bamboo, sitting on grassy banks, leaning over the rail of a bridge. In between planned shots, Di trailed them with the camera. "A" was a little rough around the edges, full of nervous energy, and prone to cutting up at key moments, E-Grrrl was her cuddly self, ready to cozy up with E and I and smile for the camera. E and I were trying to just be ourselves and loosen up, and not get too distracted by the prospect of "A" falling into water or inadvertently whacking someone with a bamboo switch.
At one point Di had E and I positioned next to one another and suggested we turn and look directly at one another. A simple request. Why couldn’t I do this with a straight face? I kept breaking into nervous laughter, all the while thinking, “My God, we never really make full eye contact during our day-to-day life.” My mind wandered as I considered why we don’t spend any time face to face and what did this say about us as a couple. Are we forever looking past each other? I was comforted by the memory of a quote by the French novelist Antoine de Saint –Exupery: “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction. ”
A little more than two hours and four hundred photos later, we finished the shoot and headed back to Chez V for a casual supper, the night winding down around 9 p.m., the day living on in digital photos we’ll always treasure.
October 23, 2006
Copyright 2006 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. All rights reserved. www.v-grrrl.com
Expat Essays, Family
Reader Comments (9)
I hope you'll point us to her website when she gets the photos up.
We just get caught up in daily life, don't we? But that saying is very true of the long lasting unions. I have alwasys liked it very much.
:)