A Mother Daughter Session in the Wildflowers | Williamsport Pennsylvania Family Photographer
- May 31
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 14
Last summer, sitting on a balcony in Italy, someone looked at me and asked, "Have you ever listened to a song and it brought you back to an exact moment in time?"
I took a sip of prosecco and told him about "Blackbird." How the second those opening notes play, I am five years old again, climbing up the stool that still sits in our kitchen, asking my mom if I can crack the eggs into her famous chocolate chip cookie recipe. The radio where we used to place the CD is still attached to the cabinets, but no one has pressed play in years.
He thanked me for sharing.
As the saying goes: someday your child will describe their childhood to someone you've never met. They'll sit at a table you didn't set, in a home you didn't build, across from people who only know them as adults.
The connection between a mother and daughter has been immortalized in so many ways. Lorelai and Rory. Donna and Sophie. Marmee and Jo. And I had the honor of immortalizing Sarah and Nali. Something they can look back on when they are older. Images Nali can dig out one day when she is telling someone about her childhood, her grandparents' house, and the love she had for her mother. A real-life iconic duo.
This was not my first time capturing their relationship. As a Williamsport Pennsylvania Family Photographer I have had the opportunity to photograph them from the time Nali was still an idea, just a week away from gracing this world with her presence, to toddlerhood, to now: a young child with a personality to match her wild red hair and the beautiful eyes she got from her mother. This time, our mother daughter session took place somewhere that made it even more special: her grandparents' property just outside Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The same fields and woods she is growing up playing in, the way her mother once did.
Nali, absolutely bursting with energy, was ready to go. She was showing me her cartwheels, giving me ideas, and was not scared to be in front of the camera, and I wanted that to come through in the photos. We made our way down to a thicket of Dame's Rocket, the purple wildflower that lines Pennsylvania's roads and woods from spring into summer. It's one of my favorite flowers, and my first sign every year that warmer days are coming.
The light was shining through the trees just right, so I had them laugh, play, and walk. Nali spun her mom too fast. She cartwheeled and twirled. They shared happy moments together, and we moved up the hill chasing the light, continuing through the field, Nali using a stem of Dame's Rocket as a prop while she pretended to be an airplane on her mother's back.
I hope that when she is older, this day becomes one of the happy childhood memories she holds onto and cherishes. It's an interesting age. You don't always remember exact moments, but you remember the feeling of being happy and safe. And that is something worth capturing.
I hope to keep photographing these two for the rest of their lives, and all the different versions of themselves they will become as they grow.
"Blackbird" is a song about learning to fly, about a small creature finding its wings and rising into the moment it was always waiting for. That's what I watched in that field of wildflowers: a little girl with wild red hair, spinning and cartwheeling and testing her wings, while her mother stood close enough to catch her.
Maybe someday, years from now, Nali will be sitting on a balcony somewhere and someone will ask her if a song has ever brought her back to an exact moment in time. Maybe a song will come on and she'll be six years old again, standing in a field of purple wildflowers, an airplane on her mother's back.
One day she will fly off into her own life. But these photographs will always know the way back.
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