Dear {Sweet} Poppy

Brittni mentioned this morning that today marks nine years since your spirit went to the heavens and your body took its rest.  I miss you.

Do you know that I begged Mimi for this piece of you?  You let me borrow your camera for my first photography class.  I was terrible.  I couldn't focus to save my grade, and I started to think I might be blind or something.  But you believed in me and insisted that I keep at it, learn the craft the way it was begun: in manual.

I called you that time in a panic. Remember?  I cried as I told you I'd broken it.  I was up on South Mountain in the reservation.  I saw this amazing dilapidated building nestled into the trees.  It was awesome.  And as I composed my picture in my head, I raised the camera to my eyes.  BLACKNESS.  My roommate insisted I push every button and turn every knob.  I was certain I'd moved nothing and that fiddling would only make it worse... 

I had locked the mirror (as though plotting a long exposure). Ugghhh. You knew it instantly from my inarticulate sputterings.

Oh, how you laughed at me.  Well, maybe it wasn't a laugh.  Like mine, yours was a soft snicker, a sucking of breathe and a gritty hehehe like Muttley from the Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

I've come a long way since that day in the mountains.  And though I don't quite have the discipline you had for learning the intricacies and inner workings of every craft you discovered an interest in, I am determined to master myself.