The Treasure of Memories

You may not believe this, but you haven’t heard from me this past month because I couldn’t come up with a topic that would be even slightly interesting in a blog. We’ve been staying close to home these days, except for necessary trips to town for groceries and medical appointments. Our favorite dining spots have been closed, except for curbside service, and the food would be cold before we got back home. A treat in town would be a drive-thru for donuts or hamburgers, but eating a meal in our vehicle can get messy.

Back home, my husband and I have different “comfort” zones, but both of us have decided that we have no time to be bored. There are too many things that still grab our attention. He spends hours every day in his shop… cleaning, repairing, organizing and building a variety of items in his shop. Living in a rural area gave him space to build a separate building, giving him space to accommodate his two hobbies… vintage telephones and tractors. We’ve been here so many years that he now has to find items that he can do without, or build more storage space. It takes longer to accomplish the planned goal because so many items bring back fond or not so fond memories. I’m experiencing similar days in our house.

I still have the daily housekeeping chores… laundry, cleaning, and cooking. I don’t have a garden now because there are too many deer in our area. I don’t even pretend to like gardening, but we do enjoy the rhubarb that comes up every year without any attention from me. It is the one plant that the deer won’t touch, so I get out our favorite recipes for rhubarb loaf, cookies, and upside-down cake. My computer grabs my attention and I have been re-learning photo restoration that I was able to do years ago. My software was outdated, so I have the added challenge of learning new software.  I’ve had a passion for photos most of my life, started with my parents’ photo albums filled with photos of me, their only child, from birth and with members of their families. My first paying job was at a photo studio just one block from my high school, where I learned to color tint wedding and family portraits. When I entered nursing school, there was only one other classmate who had a camera, and colored slides were a new and wonderful photo “invention”. These past several months, I have reminisced many hours while perusing photo albums and boxes of photos, some from my school days, some from my days of nursing, and many taken during our 57 years of marriage. There are black and white snapshots, colored prints, studio photos that are no longer in frames. There are photos that I took of our children during their growing up years, their weddings, and the growing years of our grandchildren. There are pictures of my best friends who are now no longer with us, and guests in our home that I can no longer remember their names, but the photographs bring back a flood of memories. The photos that I took when we were able to travel are now reminders, and as my father would say, can be our “Armchair Travels”.

Right now, I’m enjoying all the “stuff’ that I’ve saved. Yesterday, I found a box filled with greeting cards from family and friends, Christmas letters with added photos, birth announcements, graduation ceremony invitations, and obituaries They are tangible items that I can hold, that have personal signatures and hand written notes, and imperfect photos of family, friends of childhood homes. Everything seems like a treasure.

I’m thankful for this time of ‘isolation’ that has slowed us down and given us time to enjoy what we have, and remember the vast array of experiences in our past.