Letter to a Dear Friend

Reminiscing Incessantly

I have an old photo album with photos on the sticky board covered in clingy plastic. I’ve been removing them and scanning so I can throw the photos in a plastic bin and ditch the bulky albums.

Sounds simple enough but it’s quite unnerving to deal with everything that foams up from my brain.  Some of them I knew were taken on a trip to Finland when I was 18 but I forgot the specifics. After peeling off the photo I noticed the handwriting of my Finnish friend on the back. He took the pictures, and wrote what and where they were taken. One taken of me was inside a Lutheran church. I had no idea where until I read the backside. I was able to find it on Google Maps and it was in Seinajoki and the church interior has hardly changed at all since 1978.

What I find completely unbelievable is seeing myself at 18. (Or 20. Or even 25. Or 38.)
And this is just going to get worse, ain’t it!

I try to put myself back to the moment the photo was taken and wonder if I could have possibly conceived that I might be scanning this photo into my computer in 44 years and marvelling at how young I looked. They answer is obviously no.  How weird this all is.

Now I know why my mom would sometimes pull a little wood carving out of a drawer and tell me the story. It was a loose wooden ball (the ball would roll move around) inside a wooden cage and carved by hand by some boy in her class when she was about nine.
She protected that thing for almost 90 years! Part of me wanted to have her buried with it but somewhere along the way she must have given it to her Mississippi niece for safekeeping.

Whatever works. It’s a decision for the dying. The baggage is all the same.