Albums Early this morning I was paging through my great-grandmother's photo album last night. Alone, just one lamp alight at ttwo-thirty in the morning. I couldn't sleep. Restlessness had awakened the dog and she was outside sniffing the night. Sepia-toned or black and white photos stared at me from a hundred and fifty years ago. Perhaps more. Stiff, solid, implacable. Many of the faces are lost to time, their stories silenced. Photos on cardboard: meant to last. They have. Still edgy, I wandered the dining room. Peeked out the window. Back yard lights create odd, wandering shapes as if something were out of place. The dog, standing, at full alert, listened to the movement of the shadows. Then, as if shrugging off the night, returned to the door. She looks at me, her water dish as if to ask, 'Why is it empty?' Filling it at the fridge, I look at photos, notes, and birthdays cards held up by souvenir magnets. A drawn card from a child we know, a memorial photo, a list of chores to complete. Another album of our lives. I sit, mind too busy to sleep, at the kitchen table. It is cluttered with the detritus of our daily lives. Mail, catalogs, flashlights, a blood pressure machine. Wishing I liked a cup of tea, it feels right, but I settle for a glass of water. I really need to organize this stuff-- but not now. I'd only move everything someplace else. This too is a collection of us-ness. Telling, I suppose, in its chaos, of who we are what with three pencil jars of assorted pens, dog bones, a feather, a bracelet hanging off a marker, at least three screwdrivers and a drumstick. My coffee cup from last night, forgotten, half-empty. The stove clock clicks over to three-fifteen. I need to be up in an hour. The dog's gone back to sleep, curled on my pillow. I lie in a bed that's almost two hundred years old. I curl onto my side. The years expand and condense in time to her gentle snoring. The edges blur and I feel myself slipping back into sleep. Albums, I muse. Exactly what we are. Maybe I just want that illusive reassurance. I don't want to be a blurred face in a photo with some great-great-great wondering who I was, wondering what my story was. I want to jump out of the past and exclaim that I was this and did that and went here and lived there. I loved grand and glorious loves. I found, lost. I climbed, fell, and got up again. But most of all, I lived! I existed. And a part of me is in them, encoded into the who and what they are or could be. Laughter, curiosity, wonder and an insatiable desire to learn and explore. It will be all there, curled in their DNA just waiting to explode out of them as it has in me of those long gone. |