Author: Anonymous (Farnborough, Hampshire, UK)
Photo location: Cornwall, UK
Categories: [discovery]  [family]  [love]  [reflection]  [sadness]  

This is a personal picture with a personal story. As such, it is worth more than any words, because the emotions can't be conveyed in language. They are raw.

I took this photograph in Cornwall, where my wife and I had fled to escape the world after our first child, a son we called Dylan, was stillborn at full term. It destroyed us.

It was the end of December 1999 (he was due on Christmas day) and the world was agog with the turn of the millenium and the possibilities of life in the 21st century. Everyone was looking to a bright new future.

All we wanted was the past.

We realised one day that it was time to head back to our lives; lives that would not be as we had expected, but lives we would live nonetheless. As we were driving back towards London, I saw this wind farm and somehing in the bleakness of the clouds and the solitude compelled me to record it. As I got ready, some light glimmered through a chink in the cloud and shone down. It was fantastic. I say this not in a "God shone upon us" way, but rather an "every cloud has a silver lining" way.

My wife and I sat there for some time and looked at the scene as it unfolded. The skies cleared progressively shortly after, but the photo captures the moment it started.

We watched the change without speaking. I think we both wanted to say something but there was no need to speak it - we were in complete understanding and agreement. We drove away afterward feeling somehow better. We had gone to Cornwall and done what we needed to do. Now it was time to head home.

It will never be over. Every time we see this photo we remember that horrible time afresh. We remember that strange interlude by the roadside.

We remember the past that had brought us there.

We remember the future we were going to have.

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