Every Image Has a Location. This One Has a Ghost.

Behind this art piece is a movie set, a stomach-drop assignment, a beach, and a part of myself I forgot.

The first time I went to Taos, I was a wife.

The second time, a widow.

When I was about six years old, my grandparents bought me a blue beret for my birthday because I said I wanted to be an artist.

Why? To travel the world, of course. Everyone knows artists have a lot of money and definitely aren’t starving.

I had my eyes set on Paris, so I started saving money in a giant plastic Coke bottle my dad got me for Christmas. His dog had chewed it up pretty good by the time it made its way to me, but it was still usable. The perfect container to house my dreams. What a metaphor for my up-and-coming life.

That same year, my mom bought me a sweatshirt with Singapore, Tokyo, and a few other cities printed across the front. It was mostly pink, blue, and yellow, and I wore that sweatshirt out.

When I got too big for it, I cut out the front with the cities on it and tucked it into one of the many totes I would carry with me over the next thirty years.

I still have it today.

Getting my license at sixteen felt like my first real act of freedom. Oh, the fun I had in that 1988 Monte Carlo I painted turquoise blue, with a 350 engine. I went everywhere.

By the time I met my husband, Patrick, I had already been to a bunch of different cities and a handful of countries, mostly traveling alone. I was always a little scared to leave the country, but I never let the fear stop me.

I think it’s important to see new things. To let your neurons fire in unfamiliar directions. To remind yourself the world is bigger than whatever room you are currently standing in.

When I met Patrick, he was as adventurous as I was, and that felt amazing. A travel buddy. Someone who not only wanted to go but had his own ideas about it.

Driving across the country was something I had never done before, and Taos was one of the places we passed through on that trip. We laughed so much along the way. Honestly, the things I remember most are not all the landmarks and such.

I remember laughing so hard while we sat in a ridiculous amount of traffic coming into Denver. I remember the photograph of the tree with the lightning. That memory sits at the top of my list.

When I look back at the other photos from that year, they stir things in me. I love photographs for that reason. I hate them for that reason. Writing all of this down and looking back at those images is happily painful. There is no other way to describe it. (Guess you have to do that when you are writing a memoir.)

I am happy to have experienced his love and the life we had, and it is painful to know it ended too soon, with so many dreams and goals unfinished. Unexplored. Unlived.

I feel that way about art. Writing. Friendships. Places. Versions of myself I was just beginning to understand.

There is such a constant presence of time moving forward, with or without you.

What a gift. What a nuisance. The not knowing. I mean, if I knew when I was going to go, I could probably plan things out more accordingly. At the very least, life would be distilled down to choosing only the most important moments.

But it all feels important to me.

That is why my life often feels like one long run-on sentence. My feelings, too. Maybe that is what being present is. Feeling both things at the same time.

When I look back at those photographs, they tell the story of a thirty-year-old married woman trekking through Taos, scared of a storm and also knowing she could survive one.

I meet her again when I see those images.

I meet the moment again.

But from a new perspective. A new angle. Through the lens of a woman who has lost her husband, survived the loss, and learned how to thrive despite the pain.

When I went back to Taos years later, I took that same road. I looked for that tree. Maybe it was the company in the car. Maybe it was because I was the one driving that time. Maybe grief changes the way the landscape lets itself be seen.

But I never found it.

Or maybe I just did not need to see it again.

I have been known to go back to places to collect a little part of myself that feels like it went missing there. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I realize I don’t have to. And sometimes it is enough to have a piece of art fall out of me like this one.

Part of my Emotional Atmospheres series. A collection of photo-based digital art exploring how places hold feeling. Through layered compositions and enhanced photographs, each work transforms real images into visual expressions of memory, mood, and perception — where aesthetics and awareness meet.

Part of my Emotional Atmospheres series, this piece is built from real photographic moments combined into a single emotionally resonant frame.

Every image has a location. This one had a ghost.

Paid subscribers can keep reading for the behind-the-scenes story of “The Road”, the job that terrified me, the beach that stayed with me, and the part of myself I had to go back and reclaim.