Mabel sat in a dim corner with her new flashlight on Christmas Day. The fascinating flashlight beam became the main light source for these long exposures.
When I saw the odd results of my camera experiments up on the screen, I remembered buying that short sturdy stool Mabel sat on. Which would have been about twenty years ago at a woodworking shop on the corner of Sanchez and 14th in San Francisco. The stool was unfinished then. I sealed and painted it myself. It subsequently served as a step-stool in my black-and-white "garden flat" on Noe Street throughout the 1990s. It drifted into my daughter's orbit when she got her first apartment in San Francisco after grad school. That would have been around the turn of the century. Nobody could have predicted that the same unregarded utilitarian stool would turn out to be Baby Bear furniture for Mabel some day.