Remembering Mom

Dear Diary,

Today begins year four of my journal and, as always, it begins with remembering mom who would have been 95 years old today.  I have created a still life arrangement of things that were hers.  The photograph, taken in 1944, has always been on my dresser.  The pin she is wearing in the photograph is in the foreground.  It was a little locket my dad gave her when he went off to war.

All these small objects pulse with memories and none more so than the little bottle of Tabu, her favorite perfume.  I just have to open it up and take a sniff and I go careening back in time.  When I read the book Objects of Our Affections last year it really resonated with me.  These things are concrete connections that awake all sorts of feelings in us.

Mom tried her hand at painting at one time.  I was in art school and I thought she would be very good at it.  (I've attached the only painting of hers that I have.)  She never really took to it and returned to her quilting and needlework eventually.  We all walk our own paths in life and the things we leave behind say just as much about who we were as the photographs.