Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

Hooray! This is my very first Daily Post/ Weekly Photo Challenge entry!

Yeah, I’m a DP virgin, so?

For this week’s Photo Challenge, Michelle, from the bellows of WordPress, had this to say…

In a new post specifically created for this challenge, share a picture that says UNIQUE to you.

Maybe the image itself shows something distinct from its surroundings, or maybe it’s a unique take on a common subject. Maybe it’s a unique person in your life, or a treasured heirloom that’s irreplaceable. I’m excited to see what “unique” means to you!

- Michelle

 

Being a bit of an obsessive compulsive picture taker, I have many unique photos in the GingerSnaap archives, however, this particular gem is a favorite of mine and was begging to be brought out into the blogging spotlight.

Ahhh, here she is…

 

 

At first glance, it would seem an obvious choice for the ‘unique’ challenge theme. This is a gorgeous specimen from the 2011 Butterfly Show at The Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati, Ohio. Little Blue, as my kids fondly refer to him, is from Brazil, and if I had taken better notes, I could have given you his scientific name, but people with ADHD take horrible notes and you are lucky I can even remember that he is from Brazil AND that I snapped this photo in 2011! Yes, he is a gorgeous specimen indeed…

But the real reason I chose this photo lies not only in the beauty of the butterfly, but also in the beauty of the hand models. The hand on the left belongs to my 75-year-old mother, and the hand on the right belongs to my 12-year-old daughter. I remember that day quite vividly- it was spring break for my children, and, on a whim, I decided to call my mother to see if she would like to tag along on a field trip with myself and the kids for a day in the city visiting old haunts.

What’s so unique about that, you ask?

Everything!

I will put it mildly and keep it short by saying that it is a rare occurrence for me to not only voluntarily call my mother, but to also ask her to go out in public with my family. Let’s just say that our relationship has oftentimes been strained, forced, unpleasant, awkward, and doomed…

Oh, but this particular day was surreal. It was damn near normal, and whatever the hell that means, it was it. We laughed, no…we giggled, all of us, together, we were interacting like those families on TV who go places together and have FUN. There was no anxiety, there was no fighting between her and I, no unwanted advice handed out to me about anything, no personal attacks on my character or on how horribly messy my house was. I remember how I didn’t feel the urge to lash out at her over past hurts nor feel the need to embellish my life to suit her taste. For those few hours in history, I felt a mother/daughter connection that I had only heard about through other people, but never thought possible for us. For those minutes frozen in time, I almost caught a whisper that maybe, just maybe, my mother was proud of me, her youngest child, for no other reason than ‘just because’. And the icing on that already stunning in it’s basic and purest of form cake? Well, I think you can see that for yourself above- a beautiful portrait of my mother and my daughter interacting on a very personal level, on a very loving level- that is something I didn’t experience growing up.

My eyes never stay dry when I see this photo.

Never.

That day went on to be almost 10 hours of me, my 4 children, and mama touring the city, driving around to the places we went to when I was a child, past the house I grew up in, through the park we used to walk to so we could feed the ducks, and it was the beginning of a foundation on which to build a unique and budding relationship…

If I could go back and change one thing, it would be my hand on the right instead of my daughter’s…

April 21, 2011 may not be noteworthy to any one of you, yet I will gladly give it the title ‘Unique’. And to think it all started with a little blue butterfly all the way from Brazil!