Sentimental Momentos

She had several photo albums, the oldest ones, filled with pictures from way before I was born. There were pictures of classy, beautiful, young women dressed in nice dresses and wearing 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 was a completely different person. She was young, a girl enjoying life, being silly, daring perhaps, having fun with her crazy girlfriends, and a boy friend or two that I never knew, but mostly with the young man I knew as daddy.  But at the same time I could see that special glow in her eyes that was unmistakeable my mom.

I could tell from the way mom had placed all of her pictures, with funny little handwritten notes underneath or even sometimes on the picture that each of them was special to her. One caption underneath a picture focused on a man’s backside read, “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, but most visibly in what she saved and cherished in her albums. She saved church bulletins, newspaper clippings of obituaries, wedding announcements, special events, sporting events, things written about our family, kids from church, who at the time of her death were way beyond being kids. In her mind they were still kids that she loved, so she held onto them. She even had saved the two narrow strips of material left over from the alteration of the suit pants my dad was buried in. My mom had several boxes of these kinds of things.

For years I have tried to honor my mother’s memory by keeping her special items. However, there comes a time that we have to let go of some old things. I went through her keepsakes discarding the old unidentified pictures of people I didn’t know and other items I knew would mean nothing to my children or my brother’s children. As Sherri and I have moved into a smaller house we don’t have the storage space for things we have held onto with each of our many moves (about 15 of them). Most mom’s momentos 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.  My mother has been in heaven, I believe since 2004. I’m sure she is not the least bit concerned about those two strips of material from my dad’s burial pants or any of those old black and white pictures from eighty years ago. My dad has been in heaven since 1972, and now my mother is with him. The greatest memory I have 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.