It's still for a second, somewhere in Estill County about a half an hour away from her Kentucky home, in a field of tall grass and wildflowers, where maybe Senora May is again—maybe even right at this moment, somewhere in the field the same way she was almost a year and a half ago to be photographed for the inner sleeve of her second album: All of My Love.
Maybe she's in the flowers again, working out another lyric like “Blossoms bloom, babies cry / Nature gives love as lullaby” and maybe she's looking out over the field the same way she does in one of the earlier photographs from the day a year and a half ago, taken in the late-to-rise early morning light of Estill County at the western edge of Eastern Standard Time. Maybe she's worrying about where the time goes and where it takes the light with it when it goes, wondering if she should start heading back to the house to get to another lyric like “We've known the briars and the turkey mites well / The droughts and the fires and the floods and still / I can love you more,” but maybe she can see the dark and maybe she can see in the dark and through the dark better than the rest of us can, like in the later photographs from the day, lit with only the headlights of her car and the start of the stars in the Eastern Kentucky night sky. Maybe she's here again, right at this moment, the way it sounds like she always was right here on All of My Love and the way it feels as if she always will be—the same way the long exposure photographs from the day, shot over thirty seconds, share in what the album shares about the nature of love over time.
The field felt right for Senora May to be photographed in almost a year and a half ago because the album is the kind of momentous thing one would get flowers for to mark the anniversary of. And as for another look at the inside of the album, it feels just as right a year after its release, because All of My Love is the kind of good and grounding thing that made sense in and made sense of a time in 2020 and 2021 (and 2022) when it didn't (and doesn't) seem like there was (or is) much to be grounded in on this earth—because there is a stillness to the album, the kind of stillness that defines what it means to be still and to still be, in love and in time, a stillness grounded in a particular place on this earth from which Senora May can still reach you on whatever ground you're standing on, wherever and whenever you're on this earth:
“All of my love is for you Come on, baby, let me have yours too”
All of My Love, 2/14/21
Photographed 10/10/20
Photographs by Emma Delevante
Words by Sam Farahmand