The story

I was about a hundred feet from camp, photographing lichen on a boulder, when I walked around the back of it and found a heart. Nothing carved it on purpose. The rock had been splitting along its own seams for who knows how long until a piece was left in that shape, lichen working the edges, the color of the stone showing through where it had worn down.

I went back the next season to shoot it again. It had let go over the winter.

That is the photograph that decided what I do. I grew up going into the woods and I have looked down my whole life, but I only started photographing about five years ago, and I started where everybody starts — vistas, animals, the usual. The details are what kept me. We are a small, pampered blip out here, and standing next to a rock that has been here since long before anyone was around to see it is the most comforting thing I know.

A session is: grab the camera, pick a direction, let curiosity run it. I go slowly over tree trunks, under rocks, around whatever plant catches my eye. Some days I end up waist deep in the river shooting the bank, or something growing on a stone in the middle of it, or what is under the rocks in the shallows. I am usually in the dirt or the mud or the snow. I do not come back clean.

Water is one of the very few things that expands when it freezes. That is what split the heart out of that boulder, and it is what finally took it down.

One day I showed that photograph to my husband a few months after his mother passed away. He did not say anything for a moment.

She had been collecting heart-shaped rocks around Wyoming. She wanted to make jewelry with them and sell the pieces as Wyo Raw. I had never known this.

Until then I had never thought about starting a business. That conversation is what started this. I took the space out of her name to make it a little bit mine and left the rest of it alone.

The jewelry she planned is still ahead of me. One day I will make it.