in pictures
July 30, 2015 § 6 Comments
It is a curious thing to pack away memories and leave behind tangible pieces of our past. Yesterday I moved in circles around photographers, cleaning even as they navigated our rooms; remembering moments one cannot see in photographs, evidence lost in clean coats of paint and finished flooring.
Gone is the tiny black insect my daughter inked into a small dent in the hall stairway and the crooked lines of a secret safe sketched into the wall of her closet. No one is the wiser where little fingers dipped into the lacquer of a newly sealed plank of wood to drag an invisible smiley face against my husband’s wishes or where toddler toes tracked paint primer beneath finished floors.
Gone are the traces of crime scene chalk outlines covered by wooden floors and the indentation of a dismantled sandbox. The prideful markings of our children’s heights that once scaled our kitchen door frame, an evolution of handwriting in contrasting colors, has since been erased by a an overworked paintbrush and only our climbing tree knows it was my husband who, in his childhood, curled its branch into a handle that our children would one day grasp.
The images we see in glossy advertisements for home are an edited version of the truth; beneath the polished exterior of cleverly articulated interiors sleeps a life in pictures we cannot so easily photograph.
scribblechic 
Oh so true. When we added on to our home, my son put his hands in the cement and we etched his name and the date. I often wonder what future owners will wonder about those tiny hands . . .
True, there is no decoder ring for these artifacts so intimately coded.
Objects aren’t really objects. So many emotions are involved with them!
I would agree; the value of any object is weighted by the worth we assign.
Loved this. We’ll be moving from the first home my daughter has ever known in less than a year and I wonder what unseeable things we’ll leave behind. Great post. We’ll written as always. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for so many kind comments of late. I never cease to marvel at the generous company of strangers who accompany me, here, among my musings.