Reflections on Roots and Photos (About Moving On)
A light mist falls amongst colorful autumn leaves, their color barely visible in the trees as light fades from the evening sky, my lips let out a little sigh, maybe a cry.
Low clouds are hanging overhead and gray. They create a somber mood this moving day.
Untold years of fun collections, lots of memories and connections.
All that “stuff” of yours and mine that got collected a piece at a time was packed and marked and duly prepared and got jammed in a truck and nobody cared.
When tomorrow morning comes, the sun will brighten my mood. But for now I sit in an empty room and stare. All the walls are bare, all that’s left is an abandoned chair… and memories
Are we really meant to move on? Or, are the roots we set down meant to anchor us here forever? Are the old photos meant to be left behind or are they a kind of glue that binds our past and today together?
It’s hard to look at life through a rear view mirror. It’s smaller than I remember it, not like most of the past. It’s better to look forward to today through your windshield where your future is bright and vast.
And to my question about moving on, there is a definite answer, yes! We are meant to move on like the Gypsy dancers. But, cling to memories of love and past Romances.
Save those photos, and mementos because memories live but not forever. We are the custodian of our culture and if not remembered, how else do we pass it to future family members?
Editor’s Note From Bob Weirauch: A few years ago, I was moving from my home in Minocqua, WI where I had lived on and off for about 17 years. It had become the repository for all of the things I held near and dear to me and that I had held onto after my wife, Becky, died and during various moves with my wife, Teri. Now that I was moving I was challenged by the enormity of dealing with all the “stuff” I accumulated over 60 years of living, seven moves, two marriages and several businesses.
I was skating along until I uncovered a stored and seldom looked at trunk of photos. I started to look them over, there were family photos, wedding photos, vacation photos, and pictures from every sibling’s wedding, anniversaries, birthdays and Christmases long forgotten. The collection was replete with high school yearbooks and photos of friends and relatives deceased, but not forgotten. As I started to look through the trunk I was in a quandary as to what to do with them. Do I toss them, sort them, or re-image them digitally? A lot of work for something seldom seen. I decided to toss them.
I gathered up the first batch of photos, most of them of people I hardly knew, and I pitched them in a garbage can placed next to me; it wasn’t that hard. Then I picked-up another batch, these were photos of Teri’s girls from a Christmas that was long forgotten, but I couldn’t toss them; as a matter of fact, I couldn’t toss any of them. I recovered the ones that I had tossed earlier, neatly stacked them back up in the trunk, closed the lid and moved on.
Later that day as I was driving to my new house, I was struck by the difficulty of such a simple task. I started to think about how it affected me and my emotions, hence the following poem, Reflection on Roots and Photos.
