This month, I am taking a walk down the complex and intersection ridden Memory Lane of old family photos thanks to a push from my blogging friend, Kim Johnson, Common Threads.
Yet, she overlooked the wide load right in front of her to comment on the many other body shapes and sizes scattered around the room. I am pretty sure I scooped her slithery body up as fast as I could when she asked me why people were so fat? Fortunately, she slept through the long, hot speeches and graduation rituals where my baby brother and his soon to be wife earned life-long Big Red status. My dad was thrilled to finally have another engineer in the family. I suspect my mom was happy her baby, Jeremiah III, would be back at home, at least for a short while.
I am glad we celebrated that day, as schools, work, moves, and family pressures would impact and separate us all in the days and years to come. When I reflect on the photo of my nuclear family, I see loss of people I loved, through death or by choice. Only remnants, my sister, my daughter, and me, remain. I am sure that someone said something about Carpe Diem either that day or at some graduation speech somewhere! It is a wise message to graduates and their families.
Carpe Diem
Celebrate moments
You will have the memories
Moments of joy, love.
2 comments:
Anita, I love everything about your post, but perhaps my favorite part is the raw honesty of how life takes turns we don't expect. We have some of those jagged edges in our family pictures, too, and often the photos can be so very painful, dredging up memories I'd rather leave unexposed. To think further of exposure, it's not limited to the photographs and the family relationships here in your slice, but the shower scene set up the reader to take note that things get real and we see people sometimes in ways we never expected. The symbolism and foreshadowing of the shower scene is so powerful - - and the truth of your child makes me think of The Emperor's New Clothes and the things that children will say that adults won't. You really have me thinking here about the stories and the deeper meanings. I'm sorry about your losses; I'm glad you are sharing the way families can fragment because so many of us are right there, too, and I feel understood.
Kim. thank you so much for this comment. That shower scene, real and memorable in so many ways is the stuff of family lore. The talkative two year old's words have been relieved many times and I started with that story because she could and did tell it all as it was. My words are far more carefully chosen!
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