Spring on Real Time's First Day

Today is the day that everything once again goes back to normal, when the clocks in most of the United States of America (and here in EST where the right coast and its largely bigger liberal cities like to make art and contemplate manufacture in a timely sense) have their arms and LED displays reversed one hour earlier.
Yours Truly never remembers if this is Daylight Savings Time – or if Spring ahead is the real time.
Whichever it is from now, early November, until that designated day in early Spring, it feels like the time that it should be: looking at clocks constantly throughout these action-packed days and nights there is a silent heaving of relief that it is the time that it feels like it should be.
And not one hour too soon.
Or late.
So now it is time to get back to the pushing of pixels this now-late afternoon, images made of children with cancer and I have been meaning to write about one of them who has stuck in my memory more vividly than the others.
She walked slowly into the room that I was set up in in Roswell Park Cancer Institute with her mother and her IV tree. There was a possibility, the charity's rep and hair & makeup girls & I had heard, that she would not be on the informal roster that day as she was tired from her treatment, but there she was.
She was quiet in the way that those wrapped in pain are, both glowing and inverted in their awareness and yearning to not be projecting the significant pain that they are in.
She wore a long summer dress, a trend for this past summer, and it was a swirling floral print.
Her long curling hair was swirling in its own way.
The hair & makeup girls, a trio of sunny blondes who work at the same salon, put a little makeup on her but she needed little (in my opinion) as she was (and is) already perfect in her teenaged and unworn way.
She could not stand in front of my backdrop so I dragged over a heavy plastic institutional chair and she crumbled onto it.
As her mother got some attention from the hair & makeup girls I began to talk to her and asked her about herself.
She laughed a bit and we talked about her long and curling hair.
She told me that it was beginning to fall out and that by the end of the week she would have no hair: I suggested that we celebrate and immortalize her hair as it was that day so we made images of her regarding her own hair, it in some shots just hovering over her outstretched hands.
These are some of my images that will never forget.
I like to believe that most of my images (whether for Art's sake, or for editorial gigs, or for any other client) are embedded in my memory somewhere.
I just recently came upon one of my images in a hallway and it was blown up rather large – I recalled cajoling the three students in the shot to do more than stand in place and look happy. I gave them some adjectives and had them mirror some of my suggested gestures. It worked, and then there the trio was in a hallway, blown up and looking just perfectly jubilant and successful.
Not only is it a day of editing portraits in the day of shifting hours and light, but this autumn day has had the feeling of spring.
The seasonal shift kind of day where there is expectation in the air.
There is possibility in the air, things are changing and growing and being remembered.