i like to tell stories

I did not know she had a bird on her chest when I met her. This would be learned later. I first met her, well, not met her, but saw her on the day before Halloween in Texas. She was dressed as a nerd and she was my waitress at a Chili’s®.

I was sad as Chili’s® will forever mean one thing to me and there is nothing that can really change that one thing however this was not that Chili’s®, so I did my best to pretend I couldn’t remember why Chili’s® means what it does. Then this redhead walked up and served me my potato soup.

Three days before Christmas I met her again. I was again at this one Chili’s® in Texas, I was again sad and this time she served me my hamburger, only this time she was not a nerd, she was a reindeer.

This time, I did not let this mean nothing. I left the table my family was sitting at and trapped the poor girl near the waitress stand. I simply said I was in town for a short while and would like to someday, somehow photograph her. She looked at me for a moment as a smile appeared across her face and she simply said, “High five!” We high fived one another and would later meet on three different occasions shortly there after to make photographs before I left Texas.

One night in between our three days on the first new night of the New Year, she called me at 3:12 AM and told me to go outside. There standing on the front lawn of my parent’s house in Texas in my underwear in thirty-degree weather, I did as she requested. I looked up at the moon… It was full, it was blue and I’ll never see how all these things could ever align more then once in such a moon.

Before we met to make photographs for the first time, I asked her to text me a photograph of herself in her Halloween glasses and to text me a photograph of herself in her antlers and to my surprise, she did. Before day one of photographing, she told me her name meant tree by the water so as requested, this was to be the first place I would photograph her and this is where we found this feather.