I went back to Kinney Road with my IR camera today, the first time I have been there in seven or eight years. It is hard for me to fathom how my life has changed since Izzy and I, living alone through a brutal winter on the first Bedlam Farm, came across Kinney Road, a farm road in Argyle, N.Y.

Maria was with me, we had gone to Glens Falls to buy frames for my upcoming portrait show in September. She sat in the car and closed her eyes. I could see it was  not easy for her to be there either. We have not yet come to terms with the pain of the past.

Without understanding it, I was drawn to the big sky those years ago – there are not too many places around me with big sky – and to the light and to the sun that sent right over the farmhouse on the lower end of Kinney Road.  I had just bought a camera, I was just learning to use it.

I came in the cold and the dark of a hard winter, Izzy would hop out and sit by the roadside, I was dressed in black and blue clothes, the farm trucks would rush past me.  The wind would come roaring down that hill and freeze my cheeks and turn my lips blue.

I was transfixed, I came at dusk and stood in the wind and cold and snow, Izzy staring at me faithfully, chasing sunsets with me, and this was the site of some of my first photographs, the outpouring of emotion that I felt when I began taking pictures and still feel now. It was a dangerous place to stand in the dark, I suspect a part of me was hoping one of those onrushing trucks would take me, one or two almost did.

Chasing light and color has become my trademark, I never stopped doing it, and Kinney Road deepened my sense of what I wanted in my pictures. In another sense, Kinney Road was a painful place for me, a river of pain and loneliness. It was in the midst of my most intense hospice work, and people I cared for were dying every week. I was alone at Bedlam Farm with Rose and Izzy and Lenore, my long marriage had collapsed and I had broken down, I was coming apart.

Standing there today, on a warm summer day, I began to shiver and tremble.

I cannot yet fully describe how difficult and painful that time was, or how necessary and ultimately, essential. Kinney Road was a magical and mystical place to me then, a portal to another world.

Somehow, for reasons I do not yet understand, it was through the pictures on Kinney Road that I first learned how to steady and heal myself with my camera. How to feel. Before  that time on Kinney Road, I  had never taken a photograph in my life.

Every night, through the bitterest cold and the worst loneliness of my life, I came to Kinney Road to chase this sunset, almost without fail.

The farmers and their families came to know me and puzzle over me, and wave to me. Today,  the farmer’s wife recognized me right away and  came running over to welcome me back.

She had been waiting for me to return. I had dropped some of my photographs off at her house, and she had heard about my pictures in church. She had seen me hopping in and out of cards and left me alone to do my work.

Maria had just come into my life, and she encouraged my photography, she saw the emotion reflected in it.

You cannot go back, nor can you change your soul for another. Kinney Road and that time and pain will always be a part of me, and many nights out there, I did not believe I could survive. But I did survive, so I tried to feel a sense of rejoicing. But honestly, I could not. Standing there on that road again, looking upward at the big and beautiful sky, I no longer felt lose on Kinney Road, but was found.

I got back into the car and returned to my life. Cambridge, said the farmer’s wife, we heard you have moved to Cambridge. What a lovely town. Yes, I said, it is a  good place for me, for us.

I will confess it was difficult going back there today, it was such a painful time for me, so much feeling and upheaval and sorrow. But it was also an important time,  a defining time. I saved what was left of me.

I found myself on Kinney Road in some ways to begin the long climb back to health and self-awareness.  Kinney Road is full of symbols, the silos, the hill, the sun and the sky. It always suggested promise and salvation and rebirth.

That was in the past, but the feelings up there  were as fresh as today.

To go there, I chose my new IR (infrared camera) I wanted to capture Kinney Road in a completely different way. There was no sun, no sunset, but a swirling sky. It was right, it is okay.

I took my pictures and headed for home.