Past, Present, Future

I spent a few hours yesterday at my mother's house, sorting through boxes and boxes and envelope after envelope of photographs. It helps that I'm somewhat pathologically addicted to looking at photographs. Got a ton of vacation pictures that no-one wants to look at? Invite me over, I'll look at them and ask for more.

I did discover one jewel - a photograph of my grandfather in his christening gown. It's in pretty good shape, but I'm going to have to take it in to see how much it would be to have it restored.

Most of the photographs were the generic family stuff - babies coming home, birthday parties, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, little league t-ball games, vacations. My mother keeps it all.

And it was odd, after looking at (and confusing) all my four nieces as babies and at one and two years old to come home and tell Jason that one of my nieces was having a party at her house for my great-niece.

Time, time, time. It does rush right on by now, doesn't it?

Then there was the progression of me. Young, thin, glasses, contacts, long hair, short hair, 80's hair. And even a bit more revealing, that I could read in my eyes through the years where my ex was at in his drunk/sober stages. I didn't know the depression was so evident, that in spite of the smiles I tried to put on, all that pain was right there in my eyes.

And then the new me. She was older with lines starting to show and a few pounds starting to pack on to the once so skinny frame. The one with the gray really starting to advance, the one with the different hair color at every different occasion because she couldn't decide on brunette or redhead.

But her eyes matched her smile.

And all that staring into the past and being grateful for my present naturally made my thoughts turn to the future.

Each decade of my adult life seems to have been better than the last. My twenties were a painful time of living with an active substance abuser. Thirty was an awesome decade of going back to school, reclaiming my self esteem, leaving my marriage and standing on my own. My forties were spent rediscovering my passion for writing, buying a house, creating a home and learning what love really means.

Soon, I'll turn 50 and I'm not sure what lies ahead for me in those years. But I've realized that with each decade, I was changing, I was doing something new, reinventing myself, challenging myself in some way. I've got a couple of years to figure out what that is going to be this time. But I'm looking forward to it.

Loki sez: You assume you will survive the retribution we plan for this humiliation.