Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.

• Isaiah 43:18-19

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

• 2 Corinthians 5:17

Sheryl Craig Russell of BackHomeMT.wordpress.com wrote a post some time ago about Memories I Don’t Recall.

Her post was sparked by photographs of people she knew, but she could not recall the circumstances.

That got me to thinking and I gave a comment.

My parents had one better non-memory, or is it a worse one? We had an indoor pool. We had the remains of a turkey processing plant. When my mother’s mother died, she had a requirement in her will that we take the money she left and do something fun with it. She knew my mother was insufferably practical. Anyway, my sister and my mother took their shares, combined them and put the pool inside the old building. The rest of the building became a community meeting room. The Shriners met there monthly. Church youth groups would double a Bible study with a pool party. But to the point, the walls were lined with photographs of old, tired, grumpy people. My mother had found these photographs (4ft high by 3ft wide), and probably taken at the turn of the century – 1800s to 1900s, all dutifully framed. Found, in my father’s mother’s closet in her library room (a desk, a swooning couch, and all the walls filled with books, with a door leading to the “treasure room of forgotten memories.” Of the hundreds of people who gazed at those photographs, people thought they saw a family resemblance, but no one ever identified any of them.

Maybe a third of those people would swear that was cousin Isbell who died in 1902, but the people saying this were not related to us at all.  Why would we have a photo of a stranger’s cousin Isbell in a closet that contained the ancient family Bible, Mammy’s old school records and lesson plans when she was teaching at a one-room school house, and old family portraits (huge prints).

They had to stand or sit absolutely still for so long, it is no wonder that no one ever smiles in those old photographs.

But what is equally bizarre is how everyone, including people who were not related at all, thought they recognized someone.

I think there was one photo that my mother had a confirmation of some cousin three times removed… whatever.

But I had forgotten about my wife’s basket.

When my mother-in-law passed away, just before starting this blogsite over nine years ago, my wife’s sisters said for her to look through the basket of photos.  If my wife wanted none of them, the sisters were going to throw them away. 

My wife took them all, including the basket. Her sisters had no idea who those people were.

That was a bit of an exaggeration.  I think my brother-in-law who is older is the one-year old in one of the photos, and maybe not in this “collage” but there was one marked as being my wife, but it was so small (probably a newborn picture) you could not recognize anything.  In talking to my wife, she remembered the ugly duckling car in the middle of the collage (maybe when she was six years old).  She remembered most of the aunts and uncles.  But when she passed, those memories passed.

The brothers and sisters have already said they were going to throw them away, but in a strange way, I am taking my time.  Looking at faces that I never met.  And wondering if they are still alive or have been gone for half a century or more.

I did find one picture that I recognized of my wife’s aunt from Skinweld, the Netherlands.  We visited so often that when the border guards between Germany and the Netherlands saw us coming, they came out and waved us through, happy to see us.  And visiting that aunt (Tante), was always an enjoyable experience.

But the rest may find the dumpster eventually.

But not yet.  I need to pray for family that I never knew.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.