Lost and Found

When my father died, my brother came swiftly from Texas to manage everything. After planning the funeral, he set up shop in my dad’s house to deal with the estate. This meant giving away my mother’s jewelry which was spread out on a long table in the basement and hauling their clothes off to the Salvation Army. None of this was done in a way that was meanspirited or greedy. It was simply efficient. My brother, John, was always a very matter of fact, efficient kind of guy. He polished his car by hand; the wax applied in thick circles and then wiped off with a clean cloth. The end result was beautiful but the process was tedious.

As the oldest child, my brother took possession of the family photo albums. I remember watching his wife, my sister-in-law, take the photos off the page, leaving the little black corners used to anchor them for decades. She said it would be easier to transport them this way, but it made me sad to see the photos stacked up. Each had its place on a page, juxtaposed with others my mother had selected, and together they told stories. So, my sister-in-law would have the photos but not the stories. Knowing my brother, he probably would never look at the photos again.

I ceded the photos to my brother. There seemed to be no choice. We didn’t argue or even discuss. The photos seemed like part of his inheritance, a secret deal, maybe, that no one ever told me about.

Instead of the photos, I took my parents’ bedroom furniture and their cast iron frying pan. The furniture is in the spare bedroom. I’ve lost the frying pan. I don’t know how or where. It is a mystery.

Lately, I have been missing the family photos mightily. I am missing a picture of me as a three-year-old wearing a plaid jumper and a little white blouse, my hair curled in a pageboy with bangs cut perfectly straight across my forehead. I am holding a glass globe, maybe with a duck inside. I don’t remember. I miss the picture of me and my sister in the Christmas pageant where she was Mary and I was an angel and she’d gone after another kid at Sunday School for stealing my wings. There are more that I miss, dozens, these are just examples.

When I went to see my brother when he was very sick, I looked for the photos in his house. I found just a few, mostly ones I’d never seen before of my grandmother when she was a young mother with a bunch of kids, my mother holding her baby sister, kids climbing trees, swimming, laughing, like they had all the time in the world. I’d never seen the pictures before, but I took them. I told my brother that I was taking them and he just nodded okay. Then I looked for all the other photos, the ones I remembered looking at, their arrangement on the photo album pages the stories of my family and growing up, everything I knew about my people, but they were nowhere to be found. And then he died and that was the end of it.

I’m not sure why I’m telling this story. Many things make me nostalgic for things I barely remember, chief among them sometimes, is myself. There is always a longing for the past even when we are happy with the present.