MATERNAL NAMES
Prelude and a Random Thought on Mother’s Day
Lilly McEwan-Bell (1908-1998)
In memory of Mom
“Lil”
September, 1928
I have been meaning
to try the camera again.
The light is right today,
thin and patient,
resting on the fence
as if it has nowhere else to be.
You stand where I ask you,
though you laugh a little
at the seriousness of it,
hands slipping behind your back
as if that makes it less of a moment
worth keeping.
The garden has given up for the year.
No flowers now,
only the shape of things
that were once full.
It will do.
You say nothing about the dress.
Black was what you had,
and black is what you wear.
It hangs differently now.
We both see it
and pretend not to.
I adjust the lens
longer than I need to.
Not because of the light,
nor the distance,
but because I am trying
to understand
how to hold this.
You look at me then,
not at the camera,
and I nearly lose the moment.
There is something in your face
I have not seen before.
Not fear,
not quite.
Something steadier.
As if you have already gone ahead
to where I have not yet arrived.
I tell you to stay still.
You do.
The world narrows
to the small square
I am about to keep.
There are things we do not say.
We do not name what is coming.
We do not speak of time
as if it could change us.
And yet
everything is already changing.
I press the shutter.
It is a quiet sound,
easily missed.
You relax after,
step forward,
ask if it is done.
I say yes.
But I am still looking at you,
trying to fix this
somewhere beyond the photograph,
in a place
that will not fade
or yellow
or be sorted
by hands not yet born.
You come closer,
close enough that I can see
the life we have not met yet
resting between us.
I think,
though I do not say it,
stay as you are
just a little longer.
Stephanie Bell-Boissonneault '25
as viewed in the eyes of my father
Recently, I have been sorting through old family photos, boxes of them that somehow came to me. I suppose my mother, the last of her generation, believed I would not simply throw them away. She was right.
Since her death in 1998, I have been the keeper of these “treasures.” Now, as I find myself at the same stage of life she was then, I face the same question. What is worth keeping, and what should be let go?
Many of the oldest photographs, studio portraits from the late 1800s and early 1900s, hold little meaning for me. The faces are unfamiliar, their stories lost. Though they are beautiful, they are no longer personal. I have arranged for those to go to someone who may preserve them properly.
The rest I will sort carefully. Some to keep, some to pass on to my children and grandchildren, and some, inevitably, to discard. I would rather make those decisions now than leave them to others later.
While going through one of the boxes, I came across an old photo album I did not recognise. Its cover was worn, the pages brittle, carrying the faint musty scent of time. Inside were images of places and people I could not name, until near the end, I stopped.
There, in a small, neglected garden, stood a young woman.
At first, I did not recognise her. Her loose black dress hung softly, obscuring her shape. The setting was plain. A hedge behind her, a simple fence marking the boundary of a neighbouring yard. The season was clearly fall, bare branches, no flowers, only the suggestion of what had been.
Then something shifted.
The shoes, T-strap and slightly pointed, made her feet look larger than they were. I knew my mother had small feet, and this caused me to hesitate for a moment. The hairstyle, a boyish bob. And then the eyes, dark, steady, unmistakable.
“It’s Mom,” I said aloud, though no one was there to hear.
She stood with her hands behind her back, her posture composed but not formal. The dress, a simple black cotton frock with a modest scoop neck, fell plainly, though a small flounce at the back added a quiet detail. It was not a fashionable photograph, nor a particularly posed one, yet it held something intimate.
It took a moment longer to understand what I was seeing.
She was expecting her first child.
The photograph, I realised, must have been taken in September of 1928, about a month before my brother Darcy was born.
What struck me most was not just the image itself, but its quiet restraint. At that time, such moments were not often recorded so plainly. Pregnancy was treated with discretion, rarely spoken of directly, and even less often captured in photographs in such an unguarded way. Yet here she was, young, composed, and on the threshold of a life I would only come to know much later.
I found myself wondering if my father, who loved photography, had taken the picture, perhaps with a new camera, or simply because he wanted to remember.
I have no way of knowing for certain.
But sometimes, I find myself standing just behind him,
imagining what he saw in that moment,
and what he understood before any of us were here.