Lot's Wife and seashore pictures

Preparing for a project for my Seniors Group, I was looking for seashore photographs. Two years ago, I had come into posession of a box of seashell frames, very nicely done, eight of them, just enough for the Seniors group at that time.

Since that time, our group has grown to 13, but not all of them come all of the time due to their own disabilities (one has cancer treatments, one has a daughter with cancer treatments) and their family members' needs.

I had sent out postcards asking the members to bring seashore snapshots because one of the things we like to do is to show and share. We have done several projects with photographs.

All of my life I have been an avid photographer of my daughter, our world, my family, just about everything I encountered. It was almost as though I loved it all so much I had to find a way to fix it in time and hold on to it. Therefore I have one entire wall from floor to ceiling lined with shelves of photo albums and a good number of wooden boxes as well.

s Because I was so reliably in love with photos, my parents and one grandmother gave me theirs and I have them too.

What I found, when I went looking for my seashore photo to show and share at Seniors was a little artful invention of mine from 1984, a flat canvas bag with two strap loops for hanging at the top. On the front of the canvas bag were sewn three clear plastic bags into which were placed seashells from a day at the shore and a strip of those photo booth black and white pictures that were once so popular and cost 50 cents. In the strip of photographs are my one year old daughter, Lavinia, with me and her father, Karl. But It wasn't that photo object that broke me, as sad as you could imagine it might be since her father and I broke up later that year and my daughter is now 40, and I am now old and I shuffle when I walk and my hip hurts dreadfully when I go up and down the steps. In that strip of photographs, I am smiling and young and pretty and I have no idea how difficult the next decades are going to be - all the stress and overwork and anxiety and heartbreak.

But, then, I got out one of the wooden photo boxes and in there were all my loved ones now gone, my mother and father, my grandmothers, my father's brother Bill. All the years flipped by in color beginning now to fade a bit, the holidays, the vacations, my whole adult life which is now coming to an end, that was the one that broke me. But I shouldn't say 'broke' because what actually happened was I got a lump in my throat and two eyes filled with salty tears and a familiar ache in my heart. I looked back and turned into a pillar of salt. It isn't that I would ever want to go back, I don't. It was all too hard. I am just sad that it is all gone forever.

It made me think of how other old people like me have murmured sadly that the young people don't want any of our old stuff like those albums. Just a couple of weeks ago, my sister was walking my dog for me and she came across several trash cans filled to overflowing with family albums, saved newspaper special sections on the moon landing, and JFK's assassination among other major events. What happened to the old lady who lived in that house I don't know. Maybe she died, maybe she went into a nursing home, but her children threw everything away - first all her furniture (the week before when I walked the dog) then the photographs. Even her formal wedding photograph, and there they were, bride and groom, young and slim and beautiful. A young husband home from World War II proudly married in his uniform and his wife in her long white gown with the train spilling around her feet like a pedestal. My sister and I put the wedding photo into a bag and hung it on the door knob to give them a second chance to keep it.

But perhaps they are right, those implacable offspring who threw it all away. Looking back makes you sad. However, when my mother died and my brothers and sisters and I were there for a week in West Virginia, we distracted ourselves briefly from our grief by putting all the old photographs that my mother kept in Strawbridge and Clothier department store boxes, into albums, each of us taking home those that were mostly our families. So they had a purpose, at least briefly, after their owner could no longer be brought to tears looking at them.

How I marveled when I was a child, at the photographs of my then stout old parents taken twenty years before when they were newly married and staying in Florida while my father was deployed in the US Navy. They were so beautiful, young and slim and smiling and happy. Where did that beauty go? I wondered how they had been transformed, and whether that was going to happen to me?

Of course, now I have the answer, it happens to all of us. We may not all get stout (I did, beginning with pregnancy) but we all get stiff and wrinkled and gray haired and splotchy with the brown finger prints of death and decay pressed onto our arms and faces. I realize, however, as I type this, that the inside world remains beautiful, even more beautiful than it was back then when it was manifested outwardly, at least my inside world.

Happy Trails, Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com