It is Tuesday and time to write a 'Slice of Life."
Thank you Two Writing Teachers for creating this supportive community
of teacher-writers!
Stuff, stuff, stuff. We are still going through my parents’ stuff, even some three years after my father’s death, some five years after my mother’s. My brother recently dropped off another box of things at my house (I wrote about the old dolls of my father’s earlier this month); today, I started to weed through some of the photographs.
What to do with all these photographs? There is one very large manila envelope, stuffed with small photos; there are folders with larger photos. Mind you, my brothers and I went through family photos at the time of our parents’ deaths. I already brought home so many, and tried my best to sort through them or, at least, box them up and put them in a new corner.
I need to find that box and add in these photos. I just can’t deal.
In the midst of these loose photos was an album. Curious, I flipped this open, only to find that it was filled with photos of our Navy quarters at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, in Kittery, Maine. This was a very impressive home, built in the 1700s. Let me show you a picture from the album:
The photos in the album are dated 1981, which is the year we moved from these quarters, when Dad was transferred to another shipyard. The entire album is still photos of every room in the house. Honestly, that is all that is in this album – photos of every room, captured from four or five different angles. There are no words of explanation and no people in any of the photos, whatsoever. It is like a sterile real estate advertisement, something that is rather unnecessary when the only people who live in this house are assigned to live in this house.
The house is historical, and the Navy already has a published book about the home, one that is also in the pile of stuff from my parents. Yet, someone – Dad? – went through every room of the house and took a photograph, and made a photo album.
To remember what, exactly?
The memories it taps for me are some of my saddest ones. I was in college when we lived in this house, so I only lived there during school breaks. My parents’ marriage at this time was filled with acrimony, with a cold emphasis on ‘giving one another the silent treatment.’ My brothers and I were never privy to what their strife was all about, we simply had to live through it, in it, alongside it, with them. It is by no means a period of my life that I want to memorialize – except to remind myself how not to treat my loved ones.
This photo from the hallway looking into the dining room, I imagine this caption:
the polished glistening dining room it always sat empty while Dad and Mom held silent and apart and we all walked on eggshells
What to do with this dang photo album?
Find a bigger box, and put it up and away, until my head is in a different space for dealing with such blues.
Thank you for visiting my blog. Clicking the title of any post will open a comment box at the bottom of the page. I love hearing from you.