Taking a trip down Memory Lane can transport you to a time and place that can bring both happiness and sadness at once. I'm quite sentimental so I don't often let myself travel there unless I'm ready to let the emotions overcome me. I didn't plan on going there on this particular day but I've ended up there anyway. For days I have been trying to clean out and up. Although I already know what's in the boxes, cabinets, picture albums and cards; I have to look inside - just to reassure myself that the evidence of the life I've led and those I love are still there. Knowing full well the emotions will overcome me and make me feel things that are painful and others that are so instense with the joy they evoke. I guess we humans are both blessed and cursed to be able to feel both elation and the abject misery that can be associated with memories. Rummaging through the cards and letters, pictures and some of my journals this week, I've kept the emotions in check just below the surface, although the melancholy has been gnawing away at me. Then tonight I blew it. I turned the tv on and there it was ..."The Trip To Bountiful". I've seen this movie several times and I swore I wouldn't watch it again after the first time...not because I hated it - but because I loved it. It made me feel and remember and appreciate. Yet those feelings and memories are so vivid it's hard for me to process them. In spite of that, I cannot resist watching it every single time. Just like I know what's in the boxes - I know what reaction I will have to the movie. Maybe it's not so much a reaction to the movie as it is to the things the movie symbolizes for me. It is remembering a time gone by and the people and things and places that you've loved and lost ...and perhaps for me - the people and things in my life today and how I appreciate and love them. Because, nothing is forever and we so often take so much for granted. I never knew my paternal or maternal grandparents and have wished so many times that I could have known them and talked to them and shared some of their memories. I spent a lot of time in the house where my father grew up because my Father's brother and his family lived there. It was just the same as it was when my Grandpa and Grandma Reagan lived there...plain plank walls and floors, no air conditioning, a well where we drew cool water up in a bucket and drank it from a dipper. Several years ago I went there and spent the entire day by myself....walking from room to room -remembering...
hearing the sounds, smelling the aromas, replaying the scenes over in my mind. I picked some bright, yellow lazy susans I spotted outside the kitchen window and placed them in an old enamel pitcher I found out back. I photographed them on the window sill as the sun spilled in and the breeze gently blew the curtains and I left feeling both fuller for the remembering and emptier for the loss. I'm so glad I took the time to go that day because one of my cousins who grew up there had the house demolished after that. It broke my heart. I can't understand why she would do that but then we can't always see into the hearts and minds of others. I guess the best we can do is to live each day to the fullest and love those we care about each minute with all we have. If you have never seen "The Trip To Bountiful"... please do. Just be ready to take a trip down your memory lane.
Self Portrait
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