Story Behind the Picture: Sing a Little Song

This was just a little creation that came from bits and pieces of other photographs - a collage in its truest form. I made it because I'd like to think that birds take a moment to enjoy each other's company, that their lives aren't solely about scurrying after worms and avoiding the cat sitting in the garden below.

My husband finds this piece very funny, as I'm always begging him to stop singing (if you've heard him, you would know why). I wonder if any birds out there have less-than-perfect voices, and if their mates ever ask them to stop? In any case, these two seemed quite happy with one another, and I'm grateful for their inspiration.

Story Behind the Picture: You and Me

I woke up one morning with this little phrase in my head:

"You, and me, and the moon make three."

I thought surely someone else had written this, and my mind was only just remembering a long-lost nursery rhyme. I asked around. I Googled.

Nothing.

It would seem this little phrase was my very own.


I walked around with it. I sat down to lunch with it. I let weeks go by with it lightly floating beneath the more pressing matters of the day. Two days ago, the picture to accompany it finally came to me as well. Each piece is a photograph I've been keeping for no apparent reason, until now. After I finished, I thought the moon, which I've also used in another collage, needed a little personality...I made my first foray into painting and soon his cheerful, peaceful face emerged.

Sometimes it's nice to just stand quietly, in the peaceful moonlight, with someone special.

"You, and me, and the moon make three..."

Story Behind the Picture: You Hung the Moon

“Oh, I just thought he hung the moon.” My great-aunt’s words to describe the day she met her future husband – my absolute favorite saying – inspired this collage. Her blue eyes visibly deepen in hue when she remembers the day she met him on their first day of high school in 1937. He would later propose to her during a sunset flight in a twin-engine plane he flew over the New Jersey cornfields, just as the stars began to peek out from behind the darkening sky. It was 1941 and their plans for an elaborate wedding changed the next day: he received orders to deploy for World War II. They eloped instead, married at midnight by a Franciscan priest woken by their insistent knocking on the rectory door.

He never returned home: the plane he piloted was lost over the sea, the entire crew still missing today. It has been nearly 70 years since they stood together on that altar, the full moon rising high above, the priest smiling sleepily as they their exchanged vows, and my aunt has never found another who hung the moon quite the way he did.

Story Behind the Picture - "Reach for the Moon"

On a frigid winter night, I pulled into our driveway, my two boys snug and warm in their car seats behind me. As I turned off the engine, Danny gasped when he saw the luminous full moon high above our neighbor's roof: "Mommy! Look at the moon! Can I hold it, please?"

This was a night I was grateful to have my camera in the car with me. I promised him that although I couldn't lift him high enough to hold the moon, I would indeed take a picture for all of us to keep. I snuck onto my neighbor's lawn for a better view and, with my telephoto lens, managed to capture "our" moon.

I created this collage to reflect the magic a child sees in the night sky, and the wonder that prompts him to want to hold that glorious full moon in his hands. We all have our dreams, but sometimes we need the imagination of a child to remind us of what they are.