Hallmark Moments

I am a collector of Hallmark Moments. I am ever-watchful for those rare and fleeting glimpses of the "perfect" world idealized by cardmakers, advertisers, and sappy commercial directors everywhere. I wait for those moments to come together, when squabbling siblings suddenly link hands to cross the street, or a fussing baby stops wailing and starts grinning because he is smitten with the mere sight of your face, or when you make just the right joke to your crabby husband and then neither of you can stop laughing about it. These moments are never choreographed, planned, or expected...

I collect Big Moments - wedding moments, birth moments, celebration moments, Christmas morning moments. I collect many more small moments. Today, my Hallmark Moment came together when my kids plus three friends were sitting on the shady porch together. It is spring break; the temperature was in the 90's; the sun was hot and glorious; the sky was blue and bright. Each child had a popsicle, and all were gathered around a book open in front of them - You Read to Me & I'll Read to You. The two oldest, following the pattern of the book, took turns reading the story poems aloud, every child quiet, still, attentive, drinking it all in...

Occasionally, I capture these Hallmark Moments, as I did here. Yet these moments cannot truly be captured. One hundred photos at one hundred angles of the moment would not expose the joy, the peace, the stillness, the happiness of the day and the book and the cold popsicle and the warm sun and the moment, and I am reminded again-

Nothing is worth more than this day. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe