My dad is doing one of three things here:

-Watching a car zip up Worth Ave too quickly and estimating whether or not he can whistle at them from the front porch, a sound that assails my childhood memories.

-Looking at the bradford pear tree that’s just barely out of view to the left of the frame, comparing the leaves that fall a little slower than the yellowing Norway maple he’s positioned in front of.

-Standing still because I asked him to. I took a lot of photos of him around this time. This was after Thanksgiving in 2016. The frame of the screen right behind his head is slightly bent, because a few weeks prior he’d fallen and knocked into it. That’s what caused this scar. He hasn’t had a seizure or serious fall in months, but when I took this photo, they weren’t uncommon for him.

Some days I swallow the inevitability of things ending and blink past it like it’s nothing. Some days everything feels so precious, like the stillness in this photo, and makes me want to hold onto everything I have in the palm of my hands, steadying before the wind.