My grandmother often told me, “Cuando el diablo no tiene nada que hacer, con el rabo espanta moscas.” “When the devil has nothing to do he swats flies with his tail.”

I am 83 and I have no financial worries thanks to my brilliant Rosemary. I wake up in the morning early and feed my two cats. I come back up to the bed with my breakfast tray and read the New York Times (delivered at my door every day) and the thin Vancouver Sun. Because I really have nothing to do for the rest of the day, except walk Niño or bike, I stay in bed to bed rot. I do lots of thinking.

Today I prepared a cottage pie as my youngest daughter. Hilary is coming for a visit. Then on a lark (because I can, like that American dog) I pulled out the very thick file on my ex ecdysiast friend Tarren. I can ascertain here, as I have in the past, that she has been (and is) the only woman with that spark of womanly grace and beauty that ever competed with that of my Rosemary.

I knew which negative I wanted to re-visit. It is one that I did in a session where I shot bodyscapes (something that I would not ever do again) and one of the preliminary ones had some sort of either a light leak or film advancing problem.

In praise of the mundane bodyscape 

Many ask me what the difference between film photography and digital photography is. My answer is one word, “unpredictability”. This 35 mm Kodak Tri-X frame was random and unexpected.

And because, while I am not the devil, I can still swat photographic flies with my scanner.