Walking Down Memory Lane

Our scrapbooking consultant has a summer scrapbooking challenge every year. We're encouraged to set a goal for ourselves of a certain number of pages that we think we can finish scrapbooking and then we work on our pages independently over the summer. At the end of the summer months, we report the number of pages we completed, journaling and all, and have a big scrapbooking party where the winner is announced, drawings are held, and food is eaten (of course).

This year I decided to set a goal of 100 pages. Being the over-achiever that I am, I've already finished 183 pages since the middle of June and am still going strong. I started the summer working on a heritage album for my mother's side of the family and finished it (all except for my grandfather's side of the family). Then I started and completed a heritage album for my father's side of the family. Now I've started on my own childhood pages. I've worked my way up to my toddler years.

Having just come back from Michigan and working on my childhood home, I had to laugh when I saw this picture of me in full Halloween regalia. It wasn't the costume that made me giggle. It was the horrid wallpaper. You see, my folks ended up painting over the wallpaper in the hallway leading up the stairs to the second floor. It's now a putrid green color. But get a load of the wallpapered ceiling in a DIFFERENT print from the busy wallpaper of the side walls. We had caught a glimpse of this wallpaper this summer when we removed a picture from the wall and saw where the paint had worn away and you could see about a 5-inch section of the original wallpaper. Whoever buys the house will have quite a job whether they decide to strip the walls and repaint or repaper.

Going through these old photos certainly brings back the memories. I'm often reminded of one of my favorite moments in the movie "Peter Pan" with Robin Williams. At one point, a grown up Peter Pan is faced by Tinker Belle, who can't quite believe that this OLD fellow is her beloved young boy, Peter. She goes up to him and pulls the skin of his face back tightly, looking deep into his eyes. "It IS you, Peter," she cries. I think about that many a day as I stand in front of the mirror.....pulling back the jowls and the wrinkles around the eyes to try to catch a glimpse of the young girl that I know is in there somewhere.

Our son, Jason, was recently looking through Mom's heritage album. "This is scary,", he said.

"What is?", I asked.

"Grandma looked just like a teenager back then," he replied. "If she could look like that and now look so old, it could happen to me, too."

Ah, age. The great leveler of us all!