Creased, folded, photo in hands of memories

Great-Grandma Annie Praul Shive Johnson
A creased and tattered photo--
Held, shown, and stored in a shoe box for decades.
Hard evidence of a life lived
and remembered

Around in a circle on Christmas morning at Grandma's house, that is snapshot where I still see my family, frozen in time.  Photos have a way of capturing the smiles and memories that cannot be stored on a chip, flash drive, disc, cell phone...

A photo brings back sounds of laughter, of dishware placed onto the stretched out table.  Then it would have said the table was a mile long and the browned turkey as big as the sun. Lots of children noises filled the room, children laughter and some tears.  Just a quickly as they started, they stopped when grace was said and dishes filled.

A photo inhales wafting mashed potatoes with gravy cascading down the mountain and onto stuffing.  Creamed, buttered, fragrant, never-ending--amazing food, enough to feed entire towns. 

Then pies.  Queens of homemade pies, that's what Grandma and Mom were. Name any filling and these queens could whirl to place perfect pies, steaming hot, crust golden brown on the table.
  

 Front row: Robert, Bill, and me (with my new doll)
Don, Mary, Dad and Mom Christmas 1959

A photo can be held, placed lovingly an album, where smiles and bright eyes will look at it, talk about that day.  Remember...Mom nearly spilled the gravy...apple pie was...

A photo is taken of people of people frozen in time. "Hold still. Bill, stop it..." Click and wind. Click and wind. Then the roll of film would be put in an envelope, sent off, and returned. Open the envelope. And Christmas is re-lived over and over.

Food and family without end

A photo will travel across decades to find its way into hands of one who calls back that day with all its senses.  One who will caress faces of those long gone, saying, "I know when this happened."

Grandma and Grandpa Cardiff at home

A photo kept safe for decades in a box emerges into my hands. I can still smell the pies and feel the love all around us.

Can one do this with a digital? Can one hold the photo and feel all that?

Far from Home

Etsy: $9.00

So far from home.  So very far from home.  These are frequently said in my home.  Photos hold so many memories of childhood days, wedding photos of bright days—all do not do justice for longing of those babies cuddled and now grown.

My daughter now says those words to her own family.  Mary is and has always been an adventurer; she met and married Richard in Cambridge, England.  Now they are in Switzerland, along with 3-year old Benjamin.

Recently she asked to put my quilting skills to work and make some pennants to replace the baby-themed ones that then hung across Benjamin’s wall.

In front of our house

Don’t forget!  Remember us!  Here we are, little man!

Richard and Mary's families

Mary's side of the family

So far from home, but at least now we are almost there.  

Photos are iron-on inkjet printable fabric sheets. Works well enough, but I also sewed around the fabric photos. The pennants are detachable and reversible.

A is for Ancestor

An old woman staring sternly from within a black frame, holding tightly to black and white.  Oh, she is your great-great grandmother.  My grandmother told me about her, how she had long black thick hair, hanging straight down her back.  She was from the Seneca or Oneida tribe, you know...eleven children born in a log cabin in an Indian Reservation....

I did not know that.  Grandma, with her abundance of hair, told me of this ancestor, bits and pieces.

Grandma died at an old age and it was if I were the keeper of the knowledge. 

The photo on the wall, now sepia, was put away, lost in the dark, until boxes and trunks were opened.  My mother stared at the stern ancestor, told me a little more.

When Mom died, there was not any family member who knew the other bits and pieces of this ancestor.

I was the Keeper.

When I am gone, so shall she.

Where my great grandfather (one of eleven) was born, left side, "Mrs. Nichols"

The World outside my World

So you remember this?

A neighbor gave our family a subscription to The National Geographic when I was ten years old. 

Well, I tell you what!

It exploded my small farm world and filled my mind with questions for which there no answers available to this farm girl. Each magazine was thumbed and read to pieces by the entire family.

“Class Artist” was my nickname then, because pencil and paper were always in my hands.  And now, the Nat’l Geo. was a powerful source from which images poured…flowers, towering trees, and exotic animals.

Then at age 17, a strange metamorphism happened.  The photos had always been my source; now the captions, stories, and the people hit me in their significance.  It was as if the faces and dark eyes leaped out at me, saying, “Look at me!  Understand me!”

Where my pencil had loved flowers and birds before, now my paper flew through fingers as I tried to capture the courage, sorrow, fear, grief and more of people far way.  Peering into their hollow pained eyes, I realized that glass-domed farm-world in which I lived was about to shatter.  At least for me, this would propel me out into other places.

Source

2014 NG photo contest winner

Source
Faces like these captured me.

Song of the Soil: Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman has been called “The Father of Free-Verse”, as a writer in the mid-1850s who was pulling away from traditional rhyming poetry.  So very talented, Whitman was a teacher, a government employee, journalist, and a volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

Walt Whitman was connected to the earth, the soil, and he wrote passionately about its beauty, as well as its cycles of life and death.  Toward the end of his life, he moved to Laurel Springs, New Jersey, which he called “the prettiest lake in: America or Europe.”

I took these photos in Bremgarten bie Bern, Switzerland, when I visited my new grandson (and his parents) in 2012.  The photos reminded me of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

One day....

...and then the next.

A song of the grass and fields!

A song of the soil, and the good green grass!

A song no more of the city streets,

A song of the soil of the fields.

A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers

        
             handle the pitch-fork,

A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.

Please notice the next field over is green and tasseled with stalks of corn.

S-T Post: Shrine of Time

It is hard to beat an exploding-snowman-head in a follow-up post.

European countries with such a long history have, by sheer time, amassed incredible buildings, structures, monuments, and fountains that shout to the visitor:  “I have been here a long time!” 

A first time visitor to Switzerland suffers from camera overload:  so many photo opportunities, that it is overwhelming to pick and choose. 

As a returning tourist, I visited Switzerland by myself in July 2012 to see a newborn grandson.  My photos naturally focused on him and his parents.  Each day, I rode a bus through the city of Bern and viewed the city differently every time.

My second post on S-T is this:  A Shrine of Time

These are stone watering troughs from old farmlands, gathered together  for artistic appreciation.

An old English telephone booth without its glass, in which a plant had grown

A trail marker along the Aure River

A tree along the Aure River, and it is hanging on with its roots until the next snow-melt flood

 Sometimes the smaller Shrines of Time speak the loudest.

Infinite Jest

Times change, without a doubt.  As technology made photographs more accessible and cheap, every family documented big events.  Burgeoning photo albums showed the styles of the 1960s and the 1970s.  Silly hair styles and mini-skirts were part of the albums.

Movie cameras shrank from complicated monsters with four blinding headlights to hand-held quiet 8 mm cameras, capturing the silliness of my era. 

We were the hippy generation, the postwar baby boomers.  Long straight hair and ‘hot pants’ were the style; leisure suits were for dressing up.  We documented our life together with photo and film.

Because we were diligent in recording our history and obsessive about keeping those films, we have a new position in the minds of our grown children:

                           We are their source of INFINITE JEST.

At Christmas 2012, I arranged to transfer a big box of 8 mm film to DVD, with my narration and background music.  I don’t know what reaction I expected.  

What we did get were peals of laughter, OMG-dad-you-were-such-a-geek, and LOL-mom-you-were-so-hot.

Our grandchildren will have hours of diversion and entertainment with our visual legacy to our progeny.  

Hours and hours of infinite jest.

Westerns and Dreams Fulfilled

From me:

A drifter brushed dust from his chaps and squinted at the line of Mexican tile over the cantina door.  “This’ll do.”  He strode through the doorway as an antique piano played.   He noticed photos of Pat Garrett and Billy.  “Damn you, Billy.”  The drifter left, thirst unquenched.

This writing no way implies that Mr. Eastwood did such in any movie.

From Delores:

Crystal was dreaming of a place where her skills would be valued.  Cloaked in white, she glided down a narrow trail in to a misty world of wishful thinking.

This photo comes Dawn at See*Photo*Write

Wednesday Words

Welcome to Wednesday Word Day!

Delores initiated this 50 flash fiction event, where a group of 5-6 words are posted, and bloggers created a piece of fiction.  What will you do?

My words for this week:

Dust       piano      Photos    antiques       tile     lines

See what you can make of these words!

The Length of Time

When I hold a new crayon from a fresh box of colors, 

it doesn’t matter

what color I choose,

for I will fill the page with all the colors.

When I draw the first line, squiggle or circle,

I am six years old again.

When I buckle a new shoe across my granddaughter’s foot,

I am five years old, trying on my first pair of patent leather shoes.

I will dance around in them,

watching how the light shines

on the shoes and the buckles.

When I sit on the floor to watch “Peter Pan”,

I am again seven years old,

and I am hoping

that Peter Pan

will appear at my window someday.

When I hear my husband’s laughter

I am a newly-wed and deeply in love.

When I see the photos of my children dressed in brand-new

Easter clothes,

I am again a young mother, thinking about the roast in the oven and Sunday afternoon.

Our lifelines are ruled by the clock and the rotations of the Earth,

But our lives are lived by “…the length, the breadth, and the depth…” of our

memories 

and

imaginations.