IMBI
On the back of the picture in a school girl's neat handwriting: Malestusers Ellenile Imbilt

Going through Imbi's earthly belonging, I came across a small photograph of her when she was fifteen-years-old, the year before her parents were taken out of their home in the middle of the night by Stalin's KGB operatives and shot. In the last week of her life, I kept trying to picture her as a young girl with her Grandmother's rug fleeing first to Finland and then to Germany and finally to Canada. This studio portrait shows exactly the beautiful girl that I imagined. I look at it and try to see if there is even the tiniest hint in her eyes and in her expression of the tragedy and the harrowing escape that she would experience in little more than a year from the time she sat for the photographer. What I see is what I have seen in hundreds of young people whom I have had the privilege of knowing in my school-teacher's lifetime. Thank goodness we cannot see the future. Thank goodness we can know only what is and what was. Knowing what will be might make moving into the future unbearable.

Below is the photo that I took a couple of weeks ago as she lay dying. It is the same photo that I posted in black and white earlier this month. I didn't know about the existence of the studio portrait of the young Imbi with her braid when I made the picture mostly of her beautiful hair a few days before she died.THE WOOL, HAND-MADE RUG IS A HEAVY 10 ft. by 12 ft.