This Insanity Project will get the best of me yet, I swear. I am not even certain which phase I'm in. I may have described its present state as Phase I but, frankly, it feels more as if I'm in Phase Thirty. This process has taken me on a journey much like a roller-coaster ride and it has been emotionally exhausting.
After having gone through what I thought were all of the photo albums, I had given myself a two-day respite, tackling other tasks that need my attention, among them - mending - which I detest. I had a particular garment that needed to be hand-mended and that type of mending requires me to be wearing my glasses and not my contacts, hence all hand-mending is done predominantly in the evening. Having finished the little sewing project, I folded the garment and got up to see if there were any other garments that needed needle and thread instead of machine stitching. Upon rising, my eye suddenly settled on a lower area of the shelves where my Insanity Project is being stored. "Hmmm", I thought, "what is this dark brown "thing"?" as I bent over to get a closer glimpse. My hand touched something soft and I immediately sensed the feel of leather as I pulled "it" up to check "it" out.
"It" in hand, I recognized the roughly twelve-by-fourteen inch "thing" as homemade photo album my mother had made years ago. She had ready access to leather scraps where she worked and was always creating useful items out of the scraps such as coin purses, purses, eye-glass cases, wallets, the photo album I was holding, smallish cases to hold note pads, etc. Her old Singer sewing machine hummed frequently through the night into the wee hours of mornings as she sewed this and that creation out of her leather scraps. Being married during the Great Depression imbued her and my dad with the strongest of urges to NEVER waste anything.....and they did not.
It was not my intent to open up yet another photo album last night, but I couldn't resist the impulse to delve into something that was so intimately my mother's. And, delve, I did, but with company. My mother joined me and, together, we took a walk down memory lane and beyond, to old photos of ancestors long gone, jalopies long junqued, and good times past. Happy memories for me and re-created mental images from her handwriting that so carefully chronicled the names, times and places of all the pictures. I may have removed all of the photos and sorted them into the predictable family categories but the old, homemade leather album cover is a keeper. Soft and pliable.....just like my mother's body when she would hug me, which was often.
Thanks, Mom. I needed that.
Ancora imparo
