She had several photo albums, the oldest ones filled with pictures from way before my time. There were pictures of classy, beautiful, young women dressed in nice dresses and hats and gloves. They reminded me of those old movie stars of the 1940’s. Looking through those brown tattered pages of old black and white pictures my mom became a completely different person. Beautiful, young, just a girl enjoying life, being silly, daring perhaps, with her crazy girlfriends having fun, boy friends I never knew, but mostly with the young man I knew as daddy. I could see a special glow in her eyes that reminded me of my mom.
I could tell from the way mom had placed all of her pictures, with funny little notes handwritten underneath or even sometimes on the picture that every one of them were special to her. One picture of a man bending over and focused on his backside had the caption, “Wallace’s butt”. Mom was always precisely descriptive, leaving out no detail, when she described anything. Her love for her friends and family was undeniably evident in every aspect of her life. She saved church bulletins, newspaper clippings of obituaries, wedding announcements, special events, sporting events, things written about our family, kids from church, and she had saved them after these kids were grown and had children of their own. She even had saved the two narrow strips of material from an alteration of the pants to the suit my dad was buried in. My mom had boxes of all kinds of these things.
For years I have tried to honor my mother’s memory by keeping her special items. But now that I am getting older, and knowing that most of these things will mean nothing to my children or my brother’s children I wonder what I should do with them. We have carried her mementos on our last four of five moves. Most of them had remained in the boxes in which they were originally packed. I think there comes a time when we have to part with sentimental items from an era beyond our time. I have begun the purge. My mother has been in heaven, I believe since fourteen years ago today. I’m sure she is not the least bit concerned about those two strips of material from my dad’s burial pants. He has been in heaven for over forty-six years and now she is with him. The greatest memory of my mom and my dad is the memory that they loved Jesus. That’s all that really matters. I miss my mom and my dad.
Once we pass, we are only two or three generations from being forgotten. Our children and grandchildren will remember who we were... our smiles, our love, perhaps things we said, of did, or things we taught them.
ReplyDeleteI only remember snippets and glimpses of my own grandparents. In our mobile society, most of us leave home and go to far flung places, build a family and a career... and no longer have a true relationship will our parents and grandparents - at least like families did in "simpler" times (pre-WWII).
I say, keep those photos, preserve those boxes of memories. Give your generations ahead something to look at from time to time. Yes, those things will eventually be thrown away or disintegrate into dust... but until then, they are precious memories.
But I'd probably throw away those strips of cloth from you Dad's burial suit!