If
a picture is worth a thousand words, or ten-thousand, depending on the quote, I
just threw away millions and millions of words.
In
the last twelve years, (the time we have lived in this house), I have lost both
my parents, my mother-in-law, a very dear friend and my brother. And five years
prior I had to help my mom and dad deal with the flotsam and jetsam life remnants
of my dad’s two brothers and his mom, my adored Nana. After cleaning out the
houses of those who have passed on I learned...
once you die most everything you own ends up in the trash or in someone
else’s yard sale.
It’s
not a bad thing, that what you loved and enjoyed is considered near worthless
to your children or friends. But it is kind of sad that the people you love most
have to cull through your leftovers. That’s why, as we continue the sorting and
packing until we move in a couple of weeks, we’re filling a dumpster with what once
seemed so important to have and save. A lot of what we have accumulated, because
of age, condition and gluttony, means little to us now and nothing to our kids.
Pitching the old out a window into a dumpster is not only freeing but
empowering.
This
morning I sealed and labeled six file boxes of photos. On the way to donating
dishes to Goodwill, I told my husband that saving those old pictures, (the ones
worth thousands of words each), was stupid. I promised that when we got home I
would unseal the boxes and shed some nameless photographic history.
I remember going
through my parents’ stuff and taking home the photos they had saved from my
childhood, their childhood and the few very old more formal pictures of their
parents as children. But, it seemed ridiculous to save photos of people I do
not know. Some boxes were of an aunt and uncle whose circle of friends was
totally unknown to me and others were of people I have only known when I flipped
through the boxes after someone died and the life libraries had to be moved. So
in the dumpster many went as I reduced the load to two small plastic bins. One bin
is half full with current pics of my daughters as kids and one is packed with
my childhood and the faces of people I can actually recall.
It’s okay for my
kids to pitch the old ones when I die.
If they were to glance
at the grainy black and white picture of a backyard filled with people, a badminton
net and tables filled with food, it will mean nothing to them.
But today the picture spoke to me, grabbed
ahold of my mind and gently yanked me back over sixty years to the day the
family gathered in our back yard, as storms approached. Some made it to the
house before it began to thunder and pour, but many of us young ones dove under
the tables for shelter. My kids will never know how we huddled under the tables
while it stormed, laughing and reaching up and out and over the edge, to save
the food and eat while we sat in the mud beneath the oilcloth covered tables.
That picture I saved for two reasons: it
helped me remember an absolutely wonderful fun day, and as long as I know the
picture is somewhere in my house, the memory is alive and so am I.
The other pictures
I tossed are at rest now, their conversations and explanations silent because
no one is alive to remember them. As I looked at the pictures of unfamiliar faces,
the images said nothing, I let them go so my children will not have to.
But, how mindful
it was for someone to click a shutter and freeze in time an essay about a
moment in someone’s life even if there is no one left to read it.
Our lives are digitally
cataloged to the extreme now. No bins filling a corner of an attic, no shoe
boxes on a closet shelf filled with birthday snapshots. Thousands of images are
perfectly saved in a cloud somewhere.
My granddaughters
will most likely view their childhoods on a screen rather than a piece of paper
with edges curled from age and attic heat. And I hope that when they are my age
and take the time to look back, they will remember the words I speak to them
through my smile on the screen while holding or playing with them. And yet I
know, someday, someone will be swiping a science fiction type device, my image
will appear and I will be deleted because no one is left alive who remembers
me. And that’s okay because right now, I remember me, my cousins, and sitting in
the mud under a picnic table while the sky roared.
