Month: October 2021

Duchesses

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Two weekends in a row.  One duchess last weekend and the other one this weekend.  I took the younger one home today.  She was here three nights.  One night isn’t enough. Three nights is pushing it for my energy.  Two nights is usually just right.  We will see both of them next Saturday, Lord willing.

I have had one of them for ten or twelve nights last year. I don’t recall just how many.  We did well only because I didn’t push to try to do all the fun things in two days.  I have so many ideas and so much ambition to make their time with me as fun as possible, I try to cram too much in too little time. 

One of the funny things about the girls:  One has recently gotten an Alexa in the house.  It was a bonus gift with a large purchase her folks had made.  She loves to tell it to play songs for her to dance and sing.  This weekend with the other one, we had washed and dried her hair and I put it up in a looping pony before bed.  She asked me to take a picture with my phone so she could see how it looked.

They are children of their time in the world.  Just as I was when it was my time and their parents were in their time.  What us older folks worry about as being too modern, too fancy, too whatever, they will cherish as the good old days someday.    

They will manage their world in a way we can’t because it is what they know.  What wonderful lives they will live! Just as we have in a world so different from our grandparents’ world. 

Faith, not fear.  Love and hope and dreams and Jesus.  That is what I want to help them see. This Raining Orchids has become my “picture” for them to some day look and see how much they are loved and how important they are.  And for my friends, family and my Rock to know how precious they are to me, too.  The Lord already knows.

Photographs

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I have been trying to get photographs moved from photo boxes to albums for 20 years.  Really. Twenty years. 

They haven’t been spread out all over the whole time.  I have gotten them out, sorted, discarded some, and boxed them back up more than once.  I couldn’t find photo albums I wanted until two or three years ago.  I got the albums and additional filler pages.  Eventually, I started loading photos only to find the first groups were too small to stay in the pockets.  I got black acid free paper and cut it to fit in the pockets and stabilize the photos.  Sometime in August, I set up the folding table and cleared the kitchen table and went at things again.  I have made very slow progress.  Slow progress is still progress. 

I find the task of sorting and deciding how to load them and the actual loading into the pockets tedious. The real challenge is seeing my tiny children in the prints.  I miss those little people so terribly much. 

I am trying to get this task complete because I do love mine and Rock’s two people and I want them and their girls, the Duchesses, to see all these pictures.

I want all of them to see all the grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, too.  The family connections and where we come from.  Roots matter.  That is one of the major lessons I learned from Granny Sally.  She taught it through family stories, through visiting cemeteries and explaining the family behind the names carved in granite, through cooking her mother’s dumplings for me when she could and pinto beans when she couldn’t.  

Mother was always pulling all of us together.  Family ties matter.  Something about knowing our people creates connection.  I try to get our children together whenever we can.  We have several friends who are closer than a lot of our family members.  They create an even richer connection for us. They are included in my party tribe these days. 

I don’t remember to take pictures enough when we are all together.  I am in very few of the photos scattered on the table because I was always behind the camera. We all have phone in our pocket to take pictures.  Yet, I forget to do it.  Another thing that I don’t like is having everything digital.  I would like to have a lot of the photos saved on the computer or my social media account or a thumb drive printed into those ready-made photo books.  One of my sister friends is scanning her old prints of photos on to her computer.  It’s all a bit overwhelming for me.  There seems to be no end to this project. 

Oh, well.  I will keep progressing.  Slow, no doubt.   Slow progress is still progress.  I will keep reminding myself.