history repeats itself
Posted by Sherry on March 25, 2007
By now you’re aware that I’m a little weird, that I get a kick out of out-of-the-ordinary things. Like that sentence, for example. How often do I get to legitimately write “out of out of”? Lately I’ve been looking through old pictures, pictures I’ve already “discarded.” I needed that word in quotes because, obviously, I still have them. Last year I did a major reduction in my photo collection, but rather than toss the culls, I housed them in a wicker trunk because they’re just too precious to throw away.
At our church women’s retreat two weekends ago we learned how to make journals by tearing up large sheets of high-quality paper, folding them into signatures, and sewing the signatures together. We bound and decorated them to suit our own taste. Since I don’t journal I decided mine would become a mini “Life!” album. My life is contained in pictures, not in stories. I can look at a picture of the house my dad built for our family in Wheaton, Illinois, and up will surge memories of the hours I spent climbing and hanging from the limbs of the pear tree and the fort my friends and I forged out of a clump of lilac bushes and the blood that stained the tree by our back door when our reclusive neighbor shot an opossum to its death. And that’s only the beginning. So pictures go a long way in telling my life to this point and that’s why I headed to the wicker trunk to find pictures I can cut down to fit my Life! album.
We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of pictures so I didn’t spend much time dwelling. But one caught me up short and I stared at it for quite a while. It’s a picture of my mother and me, taken in 1975, when she was exactly my age. I even took the time to figure the months because, well, you know, I get a kick out of things like that. It’s very strange to try and think of my mother as a peer. More than strange, I’ve come to believe it’s impossible. I’m still the young one in this picture. 
Time has moved forward for me, just like it has for you, and I’m actually glad for that. So this isn’t resistance to the aging process. I’m just curious about weird things. I figure in 2032 when Quinn is looking at this picture of us together, she’ll be wondering if she and I look the same age.
I know what you mean! Recently, we’ve been watching a lot of home videos of when I was a little girl, and I figured out that in several hours of the footage, I was exactly the age Ryley is now, down to the month.
We look and act a lot alike, and I like to think that we would have been good friends. 