What I Want to Be When I Grow Up

I learned this morning while listening to Morning Edition that I am incredibly jealous of Mary Edwards' life. She is a fish biologist who has a passion for salmon and spends her days learning about their life cycle and courtship rituals. Where she shines though is the amazing portraits she takes of the salmon swimming underwater:





I have loved salmon for awhile now, have painted them, dreamed about them, read their folklore. I love them for many reasons, that they swim upstream against the tide; that their life is a circle, with their birth and death occurring in the same place in spite of a life of travel; their association in Irish mythology with knowledge and wisdom; their beautiful colors, both in the water and yes, on a plate.

But having grown up in Chicago and now living in Atlanta, the opportunity to see salmon live was limited to family trips to Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, which is where Mary Edwards spends her days with her waterproof camera. On her website, Mary describes salmon as "creatures of liquid light", words that could have only been put together by someone who has seen that liquid light up close and regularly.

The piece I heard this morning tells a pretty amazing tail of her life and days spent wading through water, shooting millions of pictures, then coming home and digitally enhancing the colors to make them as beautiful as possible. There is an ethereal, breathy light in her lovely images. They capture a world that I would happily spend my days in.