LaurieWrites

Saturn return

It's NaBloPoMo again...I said I'd do a photo a day, at least, right? Yeah.

Not inspired today. Too much going on - this election can be over any time, please...and I do hope that there is a definitive answer early Wednesday. It's been such a long, long road - so crazy, all of it, and I know so many of us are tired.

So, for something COMPLETELY different and unrelated, I took a photo of my tattoo awhile back for a piece I was writing about body art. It's harder than it may seem to take a picture of something on your back...because heaven knows I couldn't decide to do it when anyone was around to help me. And my arms aren't very long. Just sayin'.

 

I don't believe in astrology as in "my horoscope will come true" or "I can't date an Aries" (although the two I DID date, who were born on the EXACT SAME DAY? Fail.) Still, I've always enjoyed Capricorn symbols and the fact that I get the only planet with RINGS? Score. When I went to get the tattoo - at 25, in Ohio - I decided on it because it was something about me that I knew would never change and that seemed to trump the myriad Tinkerbells and Tasmanian Devils that so many of my peers seemed to think deserved permanence at the time.

I still like it. Yes it hurt. Yes I plan on getting another one. No, I'm not sorry I ever did it. Yes, my boyfriends dug it. Yes, I wish Jimbo'd measured the rings a little more carefully. But it's me, it's imperfect, it's Juicy Fruit colors instead of the "iridescent" that I described to him ("Huh?" he said, and, as my grandma repeated constantly, I offered it up, cause I was on my stomach on a table and he had a needle and a bunch of ink and an impressive can-do sort of attitude.)

I'll never not have a tattoo and inasmuch as it reflects who I was and what I wanted and what I thought I knew at the time, that's still okay with me.

Day of the Dead

I spend time in the cemeteries every time I go to New Orleans. Lafayette No. 1 is right up the street from my friend's house in the Garden District, so it's easy to shoot there. I spent most of my time downtown on my August trip but I stayed out on St. Charles on my last night and day in town.

There are more in the set here, and in this one from the April trip, with shots of Lafayette No. 3,
downtown.

These places - their history and this way of remembering generations of a city - fascinate me. The mix of grief and joy is something so difficult to understand about how we leave the people we love behind, but as far as monuments go, I've not seen anyone do it better than New Orleans. I think you have to understand loss deeply in order to process it and represent it well, and it makes sense that the people here get it.