I remember my first day of freshman orientation. We were sat in front of computers in a freezing lab in a library I was never able to find again in my four years of college to create our email identities and register for classes. My maiden name is Piszczak, and though unique, something I grew to cherish as part of my individuality, it isn't English language friendly. Every option the automated system gave me as a userid for my tenure at Carolina was worse than the first. A mutilated variant of my ethnically strong name, and then I saw the option to pick your own user id. I sat, and thought I could pick something that symbolized a happy time in my life. It came to me, "orchid" of course, reminds me of the time we lived in Japan when I was a child, and we would go visit the Japanese garden nurseries, and admire what seemed like acres of orchids in bright purples, bold whites, pales yellows with expansive blooms the length of my small arm.
Every time I photograph an orchid, I catch a little glimpse back on those moments when we walked the aisles, talked about the Japanese tea ceremony, how my mother would love one of those orchids, and a feeling of absolute tranquility.
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