Past Tense

I haven’t felt like writing for a while.  You know how it goes.  Funny how I feel this incredibly deep connection to my family, yet never go home.  I was told you can’t go home again.  I took it literally I guess.

My mom has been on a journey these past couple of years.  Sifting through photographs and newspaper archives, talking to long lost shirt-tail relatives about days gone by and listening to their own family stories.  Piecing together a history of a people.  The people who came before me.  The people who helped shape me both physically and psychologically into who I am without ever having known their own reach.

Back on my old blog, I told a couple of stories about my great grandfather.  He seemed the most upright and moral guy I’d ever not met.  He seemed like the kind of guy I would have loved to have been raised by.  I got lucky and was raised by my stepdad.  Mom has fond memories of Great Grandpa.  As Mom sifted patiently through piles of papers in Great Grandpa’s eldest daughter’s attic, she found letters to his children offering advice on how to best raise corn or how their thoughtlessness had hurt their mother’s feelings.  She found newspaper articles and photographs.  Lots of photographs.

I remember my great grandmother as a frail, old woman who wore a hair net, sturdy shoes, and a common-sense day dress.  She was hunched over from osteoporosis and never seemed to find my presence very scintillating.  She died when I was 11.

Something I never considered is that my great grandparents were once young.  They probably thought, as my own children believe, that life is infinite.  But, their time together was too short – he died too young of a heart ailment that these days wouldn’t have been a death sentence.  Their time was only a moment in an endless line of human moments.  Without those photographs and letters, they might well be forgotten.

When I saw this photograph today for the first time, she suddenly became human.  I saw my mother in her face. I felt the love she had for my great grandpa and all of her hopefulness and optimism and sheer joy of being her in that one simple moment, caught somehow on camera, given to me as a gift to my past.