All that wrapping paper was exhausting – Photo: L. Weikel
What’s going on? Am I simply noticing the effects of growing older? Or is time actually twisting, turning, and folding in on itself?
While this may sound facetious, I’m asking this question in all seriousness.
I literally just sat here on the couch for a good hour, basking in the multi-colored glow of our Christmas tree, staring off into space. I can barely articulate what I was thinking about. Past, present, future perhaps? Possibly.
Mostly past and present, I suppose.
Lately, when I think back on Christmases past, they feel more like snippets from different lives. And to be honest, I never thought they’d feel so foreign.
Pacha’s First Christmas – Photo: L. Weikel
More to Come
I’ve caught myself thinking about this a lot lately. I’m starting to conclude that it’s a natural progression that happens to almost everyone – like aging – even though we think it will never happen to our family. In some ways, I suppose, it’s probably essential to our survival as a species. Siblings head off in different directions, each spinning their own webs of stories, memories, and interconnections.
Photos viewed decades later conjure feelings that could easily have been felt yesterday, or as freshly generated as at this very moment. Others jar our concept of ourselves and screech us to a halt in our tracks. “How could I have thought what I remember so vividly ‘knowing’ back then?” and the perennial favorite, “What was I thinking?”
It’s possible I’ll be sharing more of these musings. Santa brought a VCR converter cassette that will allow us to watch the ‘family movies’ we created over the past 30 years. How the first converter managed to get lost is a mystery. But it’s barely been missed, as the reality is that we’re not a family known to gather ’round and watch home movies – a curious fact, when you look at all the tapes we’ve amassed.
30 Years and Counting
Karl and I sprung for one of the newest video cameras available back in the day. It was ‘the’ family gift for Christmas 1991, to be precise. The sad thing about that, for me, is that my mother died that previous August – so we never got the chance to record her voice and image on video. As a result, Sage has never heard my mother’s voice or her laugh. That grieves me.
I imagine it’ll be fun and poignant watching some of these videos. Painful, too – since so many of the videos will feature Karl, of course, being our eldest.
Our memories of holidays and the people we were so long ago morph over the years. So I imagine it’s going to be a bit weird now, especially since we haven’t been priming ourselves for these memories by watching the videos year after year.
They’ll probably feel a bit like blasts out of left field, even though we’re anticipating them.
We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, we’ll keep on creating new memories. That’s what we do, right? Most of these, though, will be recorded on our phones. I wonder: will we (or our kids? or our kids’ kids?) be inclined to look back on them even less frequently?
(T+18)