photography – short stories – Florentine life
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It was the summer before my senior year, I was 17 my brother 15. We were weathering the break up of our family, my mother’s second divorce, and we were still a bit shaken. But we weren’t going to spend the summer sitting around the house. No, no. My mom had a plan and it was called “road trip”. We were going to pick ourselves up and shake it off, more specifically drive it off, drive and drive and drive, as far as we could toward towering cactus, red sandy bluffs, turquoise beads and mesquite smoke. We packed the Ford mini-van and headed for the southwest. And to the blaring soundtrack of every Metal band that existed up until 1990, my mom, brother and I drove our crazy asses across Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, even bits of Colorado in a quest to laugh and to forget and to move on. No GPS, no cells, no air b and b. Just my mother, white knuckling it down the freeway as she turned up the music.
Yesterday something crazy happened. I found my new go to answer for the “what do you do?” question. It’s taken me 42 years to come to the point where I can say it and yesterday in the company of strangers I said it for the first time with intent and purpose in the open air. And I am going to say it again because fuck it… I’m an artist. As many of you know I have been a stay at home mom for the past five years and jobless since I lost my position as a manager of a print publishing company back when the crisis of 2008 took down many good people. I had to fire well over a dozen people that worked…
Well it’s been a while…a long while! But I have been busy! You can catch up on what I have been up to here in Florence and my shop in the latest issue of Once Upon a Tea Time! I hope to get back to blogging soon…in the meantime enjoy! Auria
