Last night he finally caught up with me: the aerial photography salesman. He’d been over a few days before and chatted up the kids (which is a no-no, by the way), and promised to return again. And so he did.
Now, I need to say right up front that I am generally a sucker for pictures of my farm, especially when they are from unique angles, like looking down from a plane. I did, in the past, buy one of these pictures, a 1952 aerial shot showing the farm during it’s operating years, compete with a full array of outbuildings that have now vanished into concrete foundation shapes that haunt the lawn. It was black and white, and they offered to colorize it anyway I liked. Well – I liked it black and white and bought the smaller version in the wooden frame. Yes, these pictures come fully framed and printed in some sort of permanent laminated form so incredibly durable that they can even withstand being directly spattered with bird poo. Not making that up, the salesman actually used that as a selling point. Who could argue with that? So, about ten years ago, I became the owner of a piece of history.
But do I really need a second one? This year’s salesman thinks so. The new shot is a view of my farm from the backside, taken last summer when the corn was in full bloom surrounding the property on three sides. It shows all the satisfying angles of my folk Victorian farm house, along with a pretty view of my flower beds. Proudly producing the large glossy sample of my wonderful 2 and ¾ acre remnant of a farm, he began extolling the features. It was a nice shot, other than all the flaws that make a house a home.
While the yard was nicely mowed and their was no junk cars in the barnyard (anymore), there was a lot of other metal odds and ends lying out that I was in the determined process of purging. My ex-husband's left behind junk. Eighteen years worth of obsessive compulsive trash gathering with a pick up truck doesn’t disappear overnight, and he certainly didn’t take it with him. When I shelled out the big bucks to begin to repair the barn two years ago, it was time to restore it's dignity in and out, so out the junk went. My poor barn, having suffered years and years of neglect by the oppressive ex, finally began down the road of restoration and healing.
Now my beautiful sweet barn, which got one side (and one half of the roof) remade into classic barn red, happens to have three sides of classic weathered white. This looks quite odd in the picture, especially since the colors in these aerial photos always seem to me to be a surreal abstraction of anything found in nature. The red side of the barn is crazy red and is the focal point of the picture. The green of the yard and corn fields is an amazing bright green, like after the largest thunderstorm imaginable has just passed and teased out all the chloroplasts in the plant fibers.
As I begin to notice and comment on the colors and the barn, the salesman hits his stride. Ah – he tells me – it can be fixed! I can easily change the colors in the picture, he brags. As a matter of fact, with the simple request on the order form, I can get the whole barn finished. All red, all done. Not even costing me the 20,000 that the real job would. And I could change the shade of red. And erase the garbage. As he begins to find what he thinks are my objections to the quality of the photo, he starts making more suggestions, which range from other exterior virtual painting of buildings and roofs, to moving buildings, and finally (not kidding here) to adding a spaceship in the corner. As this older gentleman, from the era of door to door sales, proceed to emphatically describe “photoshop” techniques like they were just invented last week, he loses me.
Maybe it is my scientific formation that recoils at the blurring of truth. Or maybe it is my emotional demand for authenticity that can’t tolerate photofakery. I am now four and a half years into this adventure called divorced single mother hell, and I do not believe in short cuts. Or virtual fictions of the way I wish my life looked.
My broken divorced self, having spent all this time doing the hard work of restoring what was destroyed and neglected, can’t accept the false vision of how it should all look. When it does look perfect it will be because it is perfect. Facades are gone in my life – well as much as can be for now – they are shattered. I have little interest in faking things that are not so, even if the fake is hard, durable, and can withstand the spattering of bird poo.
Did I tell him all this? No. Seeing that he wasn’t going to close the deal, he offered to come back at a different time, maybe when my husband was home. Yes, come back then.
