Week 8

Week number eight of the drawer/shelf/box/cabinet a day challenge and it's gone completely down the toilet this week. The good news is that I intend to start again on Monday with renewed fervor, energy and enthusiasm. Today I need to make a dent in the photos spread across my dining room table. If I organize them today, then I can put them away and pull out a few pages worth each night to assemble, right? Looks good in writing anyway, whether I can pull the plan together will remain to be seen. I get overwhelmed really easy. Or I get lazy. Or both. I plan to sit down and do it and someone needs to be taken somewhere or someone needs me to go with them somewhere or actually just wants my company to go somewhere with them. How can I refuse someone wanting me to go with them? Or dinner needs to be made or dogs need to be fed, I become distracted and forget what I was going to do next. Don't laugh, it will happen to you sooner or later. And the thing with photos...they pull a lot from you. A lot of memories, and they trigger memories of emotions. Like looking at the baby photo of my son, all roley poley oley at six months of age, I was the first and only woman in his life for a long time, then looking at the photo of him at sixteen with his arm around a girl the night he went on his first date. Or looking at baby pictures of my daughter, who was a clingy baby, then finding the photos of her that someone took of her, her first year at Girl's Camp, happy and having the time of her life, the first time she ever went on a trip away from home without us. And finding pictures of my parents, which at the same time will make me smile and sends a stabbing sensation through my "heart". Not because of anything that they did or didn't do but because, through no fault of their own, they are not "here". Some pictures pull at your heart in a warm fuzzy way, and others sometimes in a gutwrenching, painful way. There are usually tears associated with Album looking for the adults in our household. I guess that comes from being half a century old. The kids haven't lived long enough yet to cry over photos. Speaking of that...have you seen the commercial for VISA narrated by Morgan Freeman that is about Dan Jansen, the Olympic skater who promised his sister Jane that he would win a gold medal in her honor in 1988? She died six hrs. before he skated. He fell losing all chances for gold that time, then as the commercial goes on to say, he went back six years later and won gold in Lillehamer, Norway in 1994, then took a victory lap around the rink with his daughter....Jane. My big 200 lb. 17 yr. old son cannot watch that commercial without tearing up. Gives me a lump in my throat just writing about it.