I am thinking this was taken on a summer evening in the late 1950s. He was beginning to experiment with Kodachrome colour, and also with light. Similar slides were taken in the years that followed. For this one, he would have set up the shot and involved my grandmother, told her which button to click, and when.Â
She is the one I see here, in her short-sleeved white blouse, freshly pressed. Her fingernails are painted red. She has left a cigarette going in the kitchen, resting on an ashtray beside the newspaper she is in the middle of reading. The supper dishes have been put away and a tea towel is drying on a rack that pulls out, under the sink. Tea is steeping in a turquoise teapot that sits in the middle of the stove on an aluminum pad. The stove is new and electric, a Moffat.Â
I have no memory of the teapot, but it seems like I do. I have seen it in another slide taken around this time. Colour, especially, plays with memory this way.Â
When she finishes clicking the camera, she returns to the kitchen, gets herself a cup of tea, and goes back to her article. He puts the camera in its leather case and places it back in the hall closet. He places the stand there, too.Â
(I could leave this here, leave them. It has taken me years to remain with this image, to stick with it long enough to bring the moment forward.)Â
She hears the screen door close after him. She turns a page of the newspaper. She reads something that doesn't hold her interest, moves to something else, then something else. She pours another cup of tea, does the crossword.Â
He turns the sprinkler off. He doesn't come back inside, but stands there, just stands in his backyard. He has been home from overseas more than ten years. He hears a dog bark. Someone hollers for her kids to come in.Â
The sound of water dripping from the hedge. The smell of grass, of wet earth. The evening light slowly slips away.Â
The light from the kitchen window gets brighter. Darkness brings colour to it, yellow, almost orange. He knows that, he's noted it many times. He recalls the dim lights in the windows of his childhood, and the smell of coal oil burning. He thinks about the long summer evenings of his boyhood, under a prairie sky.Â
He is not entirely sure of anything. But his hunch is at some point she will go to the sink to rinse her tea things, and become drenched in the light of the kitchen window. He decides to stay outside and watch, just for the sake of seeing it.  Â