More’s the pity, I no longer care how I felt in Lisbon when I was 14 years old, but I wish I could see what I saw when I was there — if anything penetrated the fog of adolescent self-absorption. Why did I wait so long to get a camera? So many subjects, so much material, so much time with loved ones, unrecorded. I suppose the messy scrapbook of my brain was so cluttered with remembered images that I figured actual pictures were beside the point. And they were, until those memories began to fade.

As a child, I was one to stop, stoop and peer, painfully nearsighted — a condition that went undiagnosed for a long time, because my mother was horrified that I would have to wear glasses. Not for me the starry night sky, or the view out over a valley, or small creatures scampering through the canopy of trees in the backyard. I had blurry impressions, at best, of what was going on out there, and it was frightening. What I could see was what held still, and what was near. Pebbles in a stream, clear cold water rippling over them. Tiny bones sunk in the mud, the skull of a decaying animal. Those are the remembered images of a child wakening to the world around her.

When I finally did get glasses, at 12, it felt like nothing short of a miracle. That a person could actually see squirrels perched up high on a branch, or stars, twinkling individually, in a dark sky. All that had been there all along — and I had never seen it. Everyone else had had a postcard view of life. Now I did too. Perhaps that was why I was drawn to postcard views; they looked exotically grand, to my eye.

Now my camera allows me to capture the way I see the world — which turns out to have nothing to do with postcard views but rather more to do with glorious details, the way timbers meet on a Shaker roofline, or how lichen bursts open on a stone — and to re-experience it, and share it. What’s more, a camera offers a way to compare notes. My son recently showed me photographs from his honeymoon in New Zealand: The views were large, pulled back and breathtakingly beautiful. I suppose that is how life feels at the beginning of such an expansive and mind-bending journey as marriage: awesome. The views I’ve been focused on at this end of life are much smaller, though that word minimizes their impact: awe-inspiring.