pure faith

Beautiful days here in the suburbs. Kids playing outside, running in and out of our house. And garage. And house again. And backyard slamming the screen door. And garage again. Repeat 4 hours. That my friends, is good music. To me that is pretty close to Heaven. To my husband, it is pretty close to a nervous breakdown. He has about a 2 slam threshold. He was on the road, so no worries. They were also throwing things on the roof and letting them trickle down into the backyard. I had to stop them when I saw the littlest of all picking up a huge limestone boulder. Good thing I looked when I did. Good thing I didn't pick up that puppy last week.

Next, Luke and his 3 little friends had the mini trampoline out on the driveway with 2 boxes stacked on top of each other with various other treasures stacked on top of them. He then would run, jump on the mini trampoline and fly over the collection and land on a tiny teeny blanket for a soft landing. I did not hear crying, so I continued on with my duties. Duties is sure a funny word. Have you done all of your duties? Or perhaps you are duty free. My duties were putting photos into a book that has been sitting on my makeshift desk for months. Felt good to start. But now, all of our friends and relatives are spread out on the floor, waiting to be put in categories and entered gently into the correct month/ year. I will do that next..mostly because I do not want to have weird dreams about all of those people in our bedroom. I think I wrote about scrap booking in a previous blog. Let's just say that if I could hire someone to put photos into a book, in an orderly fashion without all of the flowers and shit, I would do it. No offense to the scrap booking community. I love their work. I just get hives thinking about actually doing it. They have scrap booking parties, vacations and cruises. That to me is like hell on water. I could not imagine cutting, pasting and organizing for 4 days. I think Purgatory sounds like more fun. So because of that, I take pictures, get them developed at Sam's Club and then have them sit on my desk for a half of year before I am guilted ( not really a word..but nonetheless) into putting them in a book. Guilted only by me..no one else. I just don't want to hand Luke a huge box when he is out on his own and say.."Here is your life..good luck." Like, yes, my mom did. She was not a big organizer when it came to family history. Oh, there is a photo album here and there started and stopped, from about 1962 when my oldest brother was born...and then skipped to '65 when I was born and then '68 when my youngest brother was born..and maybe a shot or two at a random sepia toned Christmas, but that's about it. Her response was always, " I was too busy to do stuff like that" or " You are lucky to have any at all.." Thanks Martha.

In fact, I recently helped her go through boxes and boxes of old photos and yes..put them into several photo albums. It was fun looking at old pictures and listening to stories my mom had about relatives and friends. Our conversation went something like this. "Hey mom, who is this at your wedding?" "I don't who the hell that is" "Hey mom, who is this holding me when I was a baby at my baptism?" "How should I remember that? That was 44 years ago." Hey mom, tell me about this vacation" "Just shove it in the plastic and get this over with..it's giving me a headache" Good times.

So I will do my very best to keep an organized timeline in photo land. Surprisingly Walt's mom did not keep a detailed handle on the photos in their family. She was too busy moving and decorating and entertaining and sewing and quilting and cooking and volunteering. She is so gifted in her art, I am thankful that scrap booking did not come into our consciousness until the 1980's. I would be up a creek to keep up. See, I thank God that I am a singer and a writer and she is neither. She is so incredibly gifted in art, sewing, cooking entertaining that I would never live up the task of being like her. I am also grateful that Walt was 40 when he got married, so the myth of a wife that cooked and cleaned might have escaped his brain around the time he turned 35. He was really self sufficient by the time he got to me. But he also came into the marriage with a box of photos.

My friend Gayle made me the most beautiful scrap book for my 1st marriage. That marriage lasted a little longer than a semester in college. I will write about it sometime when I feel the need to put Tabasco in a wound..so probably not tonight. So Gayle was married, had children and was well on the domestic train in her early 20's. She had a super clean home, organized and ran a babysitting service. She also had time to make these incredibly beautiful books with speech bubbles, tickets from plays, trips and yes, beautifully placed photos. So for our wedding gift she made a gorgeous book of memories. Amazing.

So much work. So many memories. A moment in time. When I moved out of my little apartment in Nashville and moved in with Walt, my soon to be new husband, I came across the memory book that she made years before. Whew. What do ya do? The photos captured such a joyous day. It seemed so surreal to look through. I did not know who that was in the pictures standing next to that handsome man in a tux. I kind of remember Gayle's mom doing my hair that day. I remember walking down the stairs of my new home that my fiance and I bought together before our wedding and seeing my older brother in a tux waiting to drive me to the church. Everything else is kind of a blurr..but there I was, in my attic, kind of remembering there was a great celebration..on a beautiful fall day..with a full moon and smiling faces. Relatives. Friends. All preserved in this work of art. I think people had fun. It looked like it. But now I had to throw it away. I could not take this day into my next home. It is something that I could not carry with me to pass along to my children to be. So pretty, so full of light but now, so full of sadness. A moment in time.

My mom calls that day the The Event. Or sometimes The Family Reunion. Sweet. She probably wouldn't remember the people in the photos anyway. Lord knows they wouldn't be in a book.

So, Luke was jumping on a mini trampoline on to concrete, really, landing in a front somersault roll. Pure faith that everything was going to be alright. No worry about what might happen if.. Freedom in it's purest state. Enough confidence that it made his buddies believe that they could fly as well. And they did.

That is my lesson this week. Pure faith. Believe you can fly. And take pictures along the way.

11:11 pm