March 3, 2023…
I’m “cleaning” house – No! not that kind of cleaning, with mop and dust rag! I am, rather, looking at all the photos from my albums but more importantly from the old albums, the photos I scanned a few years ago.
What’s to become of all these pictures? My children will inherit them, of course, but will they feel about them the way I do? I don’t see how they can feel the same way; after all, most of the people in these photos were long dead before my children were born. I was lucky enough to meet many of them, but I learned who these old family members were and how they were related to me because my grandmother talked about them or wrote about them and then shared them with me.
But it has just occurred to me that my children don’t need to revere these old photos and the stories that go with them the same way I do. My children will have their own lives to look back on, the same way I look back. If these photos have value to me, that’s all that matters.
The children are welcome to them all not because of what they mean to me, but because they are pieces of history that others lived. I cherish my history because I lived it, not because someone else might appreciate it. Every moment in my life – all the awful and all the wonderful – makes who I am today. The me of tomorrow will be different because of what I will experience today, in the next hour or the hours after that. If my history or the histories of my ancestors teach anything it will be that one’s life is a series of moments – all of them teachable moments – and if I recognize something valuable, all the better.
