The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

The basement

I spent the next two days in my basement.

I do not know how much you know about film, so I will tell you the short of it. You load the film onto a metal reel in the pitch dark, by feel, and put it in a tank, and then you can turn the light back on.

Then it is developer, and stop bath, and fixer, and a long rinse, each one timed on the old kitchen clock hanging on the wall down there. My hands still knew it. I did not have to think.

I did one roll at a time, the way I always did. I hung each strip from a clothespin on the line over the sink to dry, with a second clothespin on the bottom to keep it from curling.

When the last strip was hanging, I sat down on the bottom basement stair and just looked at that line of film for a long time. Nine strips. Three hundred little pictures of my granddaughter.

Then I went upstairs and slept like I had not slept in years.

The next morning I made contact sheets, which is where you lay the strips of film right on the photo paper and make one print of the whole roll, so you can see every frame small.

I went through them with my old magnifying loupe at the kitchen table, frame by frame, with a red grease pencil, the way I used to go through a Friday night ballgame.

The first roll was what I expected. Stiff. A girl being polite to her grandfather.

The second roll, frame fourteen, was the laugh.

I put the loupe down. I picked it back up. I looked again.

It was her on the stone steps, in that faded jacket, laughing out loud, with her hair flying and the orange maples behind her going soft and the brick of the courthouse warm in the light.

It looked like her mother at seventeen. It looked like her grandmother at seventeen, if I am honest, my wife, whom Tamsin never got to meet.

I sat at the kitchen table for a while with my hand over my eyes. Then I went back down the stairs and printed it.