I feel like my engine’s racing but I’m stuck in second gear. (There’s a song in there somewhere.)
I have gone to three weddings and am on my way to a fourth, have knitted three pair of baby booties for friends this summer. My life is so full of…life…right now...and I want to both slow it down and leap ahead. The past and the present and the future all seem to flow through my days, almost dreamlike.
I have aging parents – one doing well, the other not so good. Who’s going to remember the stories? Who’s going to carry on the traditions? My sisters and brother and I are close but have never lived close – but I am feeling the distance so acutely now.
I have gotten so much comfort knowing that my mother and father can tell me who is related to whom – and I mean down to the third cousin twice-removed – we southerners are serious about that kind of thing. Even things like, “that plate used to belong to Great Aunt Sudie” or, “that handmade lace was made by Great-grandmother” for my grandmother’s trousseau. (Trousseau: that’s an old-fashioned notion.) I believe most of my childhood memories mostly came from hearing the stories over and over. I guess I am afraid that my memory won’t hold all that – and then what happens? I am clinging to nostalgia a little bit. Well, and loving it.
I have just framed some of that handmade lace and the handmade kitchen aprons and am restoring an old quilt with handspun thread and handspun cotton from my great-grandmother’s field, with pieces of her old dresses in it. At moments, I am immersed in memory and feeling a physical connection to these long-gone souls.
On the other hand, I am confronted with the future in the form of a very independent daughter just about ready to fly off into the world. Where did the time go? I keep trying to pull out family movies and albums – “come on, it’ll be fun!” Nope, no interest, she is looking ahead, not backward. I am looking ahead too – I am so excited for her, my imagination runs wild with the possibilities and adventures she may live. Oh, but that wonderful 9-year-old girl, where did she go? She was fun too.
Time seems to scope in and out every day – I have a wonderful photo of Grandma when she was nine, dressed like a wood sprite (for Halloween?); I can imagine my mother all leggy and running wild in the country (I believe her brothers taught her to drive the truck when she was 9); myself at nine sneaking my copy of the “Exorcist” to camp (which I had been forbidden to read), my daughter dancing in the aisles of the Grand Lake Theatre at the Spice Girls movie...her daughter?
I am still working to finish up my CD. Just decided yesterday to title it Loango. That’s the little crossroads town in south Alabama where my mother grew up. Still all dirt roads…except now there are vile meth labs sprouting up in these backwoods places. Makes me so mad. Anyway, putting together the artwork for the CD has given me license to swim around in my family history. I just want to remember, I want to really see and experience what is happening today and now, and I want to carry some of the rich past with me into the future.
