image courtesy Chere Labbe Doiron
AT FIRST GLANCE she floats. The photograph eventually orients you, but for a moment you are confused. “What is this woman doing here,” you ask yourself, “hovering in the middle of the scene?” Then you see that what she’s standing behind and tucking her folded elbow over isn’t a cloud, as you first thought, but the fluffy ghost of a gate, white with the chalk lines of memory.
Her lower half is hidden behind the brightness of the gate. She was probably standing on two feet at the time the photograph was taken, but you must take this fact on faith, for neither of her legs can be seen. Here she seems to float or walk on invisible stilts. Her upper half, a bubble framed at its bottom edge by her horizontal arm, smiles and waves a hand in the air.
She invites you in for tea, greeting you at the gate, and you are with her in that timeless realm, hazy with the static of her soul.