Jen

All I've got is a photograph, but it's not enough.*

Yeah, so I did a whole lot of nothing yesterday, but that’s cool with me. I watched a lot of TV. Actually, I haven’t watched that much TV in awhile. 3 straight hours. Ugh. I felt so terrible after I realized how long I was sitting there, that I decided to clean. I needed to get up and do something. Either that or have my ass flatten out like a pancake.

After cleaning, I spent a lot of time going through old photographs that were given to me when my parents moved. For awhile when I was in high school, my step dad’s grandma, making her technically, my great grandmother, lived with us. We call her Busia, which is grandma in Polish, I think. Anyhow, she was nuts. She would “iron” clothes without the iron plugged in. She would sneak food from the pantry and when you asked her what she was doing, with her mouth full, she’d say, “nothing.” Of course, she is very old (I believe she is now 96) which gives her an excuse.

Anyway, she made my life suck for two years. Not because we didn’t get along but when you’re in high school, and your parents are out of town, you want to have friends over. You can’t do that with a 80-something-year old Busia hanging about. Or you can and just freak the hell out of her.

The point of all this is, when she moved, she left two large boxes of photos at my house. We didn’t find them until my parents started packing. We were going to see if she wanted them, but we figured she probably didn’t care about them anymore really. Maybe that’s not the right assumption, but she hasn’t asked about them since she moved out. I’m figuring that she forgot about them.

The photographs are incredible. One album is from 1932-1937. Another one is of some relative of mine, name unknown to me, stationed in Alaska in 1944. The pages are so old and fragile that they crumble between your fingers. I wore bags on my hands to keep my skin’s oil off of them. I’d hate to destroy them before their time. It was quite amazing to flip through them, looking at weddings, holidays and everyday events of people who I didn’t know and yet I had their memories.

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t a whole lot of nothing.

*Yeah, so I quoted Def Leppard. I’ll admit it, I used to like them, like when I was 7! So there.