I grew up in a small town in New Mexico. I hated everything about it for exactly the reasons you just read.  It was a small town.  In New Mexico.  I dreamed of big city living with traffic jams and skyscrapers.  My parents would even tell you, to this day, that on every vacation we took, I asked if we could move to that city rather than returning to New Mexico.  If only I knew then how magical it actually was.

My parents were very scrappy during my childhood.  They were 22 years old when they had me, and I was their fourth baby.  The last of the bunch to round out at an even number, and to make sure that my brother wasn't the only boy AND the baby of the family.  My parents were young, and they worked hard to pay the bills that came along with having four babies under the age of 6.  We moved often, first from a small trailer and then to an old house behind my Grandpa's shop.  When I was around 8 years old, we moved in with my Grandmother.  Grunner, as we called her, had a small five-acre farm where my parents eventually raised goats, a couple of cows and some horses.  Most notable, though, were the peacocks that roamed the property.  They would perch upon fence posts, stroll through the chicken coop, and drop feathers all over the yard.

I remember how I gathered feathers as a young girl and I would lay in the grass and stoke my cheek with the softness of the tip of each plume… my fingers would slide down the side of the eye of the feather and create a storybook wave of the design before it settled back into place just moments later.

Widowed at the age of 56, Grunner was the center of the family.  She somehow seemed to carry a special relationship with not only her children (my dad), but with her thirteen grandchildren, as well.  And later on, even more great-grandchildren.  There are so many Grunner-isms that only our family would understand that I won't try to explain here, but the one that has seared itself into my memory is the 35mm film camera that was forever attached to her hand.  We purchased many digital versions to try to replace this dinosaur, but she would never even take them out of the box long enough to try to learn to use it.   This camera, as it sits on the table in this image to the right... was her journal.  She photographed everything that meant anything to her.  I remember her coming home from long road trips when I was a little girl and showing me photo after photo of the sun setting out her driver's side windshield.  She would snap her shutter as she drove and see beauty in the landscape all around her.  Her and I discussed photography often as I got older.  She was mesmerized every time that I told her where I was traveling to take photographs for clients.  In her words... "I'm just gobsmacked, Jodi."  Her pride for what I was doing radiated when we spoke about this love we shared.  

the               story

I love you soooooooo much.  xo.  Grunner

One of my fondest memories of Grunner’s farm house was pulling into the long, pecan-tree-lined gravel driveway and seeing handfuls of peacocks strolling lazily across the acreage.

plume

Grunner passed away suddenly two days after her 90th birthday... and two days before I was planning to surprise her with a visit home to celebrate. It devastated our family. I first began to take photographs of the clouds outside my airplane windows a few months into the grief of her passing. Those photos reminded me of her in such a way that I felt as though I was picking up the artistry that she had left behind for me. It is with her legacy and the talent she gave me that I was finally able to say goodbye. I have hand chosen each and every image for Plume with Grunner in mind.  Each one is an image that I think we would have loved together, and every one seems to say to me... as she signed every birthday card... every year...