December 14, 2005
Wednesday

When I started this Winter Count project I knew I could find an image for each month that was something I’d created myself, since I’d spent January and February learning to use my new camera and was determined to practice with it before I went to Wyoming. At left is a picture of my daughter, Lynn, and Will, her boyfriend of two years and one month at the time this picture was taken. The occasion was his high school junior prom. You don’t need a fancy multi-function camera loaded with professional-grade film to take the basic stand-against-the-wall-and-say-cheese prom shot. But Lynn has always been my favorite subject.

She turned 20 this past September. Will will not be 18 until the end of this month. In March of her eleventh grade year Lynn and her friend Bethany were both recovering from, if not broken hearts, at least the dislocations of their first big breakups. Both had been the dumpees rather than the dumpers. At school musical practice one night they thought it might be fun to flirt with two ninth grade boys, give them a thrill. Ha Ha Ha.

And here we are.

This picture was taken on April 30. I’d begun the month still in a winter funk. As the days lengthened and brightened, so did my mood. I began writing again. I watched the Pope die and the Prince of Wales get married (again). The morning of the prom I’d written in my journal a line from Joan Borysenko’s Pocketful of Miracles: “Everything in the universe flows and moves. Nothing is static.”

People sometimes ask me and other online journallers why we do this. Why do we put our lives out there? Do we think everyone else is as interested in us as we ourselves are?

A few days ago I directed readers of this space to the piece I wrote about cookie baking for last year’s Holidailies. The next-to-last paragraph reads:

I labored mightily the entire day and brought forth four dozen sand tarts (not six dozen — you can’t read though mine), four dozen (not five dozen) corn flake cherry drops, but only two dozen instead of five dozen Toll House cookies. I did not do them à la Rose, but à la Dennee, to honor my best friend from Fifth Street, Dennee Frey. She taught me that not only did you not have to double all the ingredients but the chocolate, you didn’t have to make the cookies so small you got a yield of five dozen.

I had cherished our friendship, possibly more than she knew. We’d gone to different high schools but managed to keep the relationship going. Different colleges made that more difficult, and we’d established very separate lives. I had not seen Dennee since 1968, nor heard from her since 1971 or 1972, not long after she moved to California. I’d googled her name a few times, gotten some information I was certain was hers (how many women named Dennee would be authorities on pharmacy for the aged in California?), but had been too shy to proceed.

Sometime in April Dennee evidently googled her own name, and on April 29 she wrote to me.

“Margy,” the note began, the name by which she knew me.

And that’s why I stay online.

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