I was cleaning over the weekend, and what inevitably happens, happened. I found an old camera. I fired it up and checked out the old pics that were in it, some from last year and some even further back. I found this one. I knew I didn’t take it, but thought maybe Eugene did. I posted it on the Russian River Memories Facebook page where my brother, Mike, remembered the photo and took the credit. A beautiful picture, a beautiful memory from late August 2017. My brother commented, “August 24, 2017, before the fire…and Mom and Dad were still here.” That was all it took for the wave to hit.
“Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow…“
Ahhh, September…a time to remember. And, boy, this photo and that comment had me hurling back like in a time machine movie to a time when my parents were alive. Hurling back to the last licks of summer at the river – splashing, swimming or sitting in the sun – either when I was a kid or when I had kids, “…and Mom and Dad were still here.” The two people who walked the farthest with me on this earthly journey. (Mary might beat them though.) I miss them. I even miss my dad…as curmudgeonly as he was. I certainly miss him during football season.
Ironically, as I was recently watching videos of the tragedy of September 11th, I was telling one of my daughters about it. Then I realized, she hadn’t even been born yet. And the others were so young. Between the two instances, the above photo with my brother’s heart-wrenching comment and the conversation about 9/11, I felt like I was on this cosmic boundary (kinda like Janus) remembering people who are no longer here, and realizing the people I live with were not alive just 23 years ago. Am I making sense?
In 2017, when the photo was taken, my parents were “still here” and all my children had been born as well as three of my grand-kids. There are three more grand-kids who didn’t get to meet them. New people. New personalities. Descendants.
I am an autumn person, and reminiscing and remembering, (while listening to sad folks songs) is my cup of tea, I excel at it. I could get lost in the memories. Childhood, teenage years, young adulthood and the long journey of marriage and child rearing…all of which are in the rear view mirror now. Yikes! What a long, strange trip it’s been!
Now all these new people…little people, rough and tumble and rambunctious little boys and cute and coy and captivating little girls. Boy, how did I manage to raise ten??
As much as I long to linger in the past and remember when “Mom and Dad were still here”, I need to look forward and dive into the future positively, even eagerly, for these fun little people that the Lord has put in my life. And there may be more…LOL.
So how do I turn this around? How do I use autumn and this chronic habit of nostalgia as a fertile soil for future memories with these new little people and even with my own adult kids? How do I wrench my backward looking gaze to a future looking vision?
It’s a little scary to look forward now because those days are numbered, and I’m far enough through the tunnel to begin to see some light. And I am tempted to despair or be fearful about that…but I remember something, or Someone else. Someone who traveled with me even when I was “being knit in my mother’s womb.” Who continues to travel with me, and Who I will be with in eternity. “In my Father’s house, there are many abiding places…” John 14:2.
I think being nostalgic is safe for me. I’m safe in those memories because I lived them and survived them. If I look forward, especially now that my kids are grown and my parents are gone, there are no road markers. I’m in uncharted territory. Unmoored, untethered and unseen. But again…Isaiah writes, “I will lead the blind on a way they do not know; by paths they do not know I will guide them. I will turn darkness into light before them, and make crooked ways straight. These are my promises: I made them, I will not forsake them.”
My immediate and eternal future is safe in His hands, He will guide me. He promised! And I pray He will help me knit myself into the lives of those little people and those ones who used to be little while “I am still here.” And perhaps, I can knit some of my love of the Savior into all of their lives as well.
FROM THE SHOE 