Weekly Image Of Life: A Lifetime Of Memories

This challenge is very difficult, for indeed when you are older you do have a lifetime of memories rather too many to express in one post! So Island Traveler I have limited myself to photos already on the computer, which does include a few scanned images of the pre-digital era. Isn’t it amazing how quickly our lives have changed! My memories all revolve around people, family and close friends, so of course I cant include all I would like, but just a few significant times. Others who are not included are perhaps even dearer in the heart, but this is about photos and memory. I would like to show you my first child in his bassinette, or listening to his father play guitar for him, or the second child using a hammer at about 13 months of age, for it was always tools and creating things that fascinated him, or the third child standing on the kitchen bench aged two cutting carrots with a sharp knife, because that was what had to happen. Instead here are more than enough images!

Father blowing bubbles for the first son, supported and held on an old Australian cedar settle that belonged to my great-grandmother. The seventies wallpaper brings those times vividly alive to me, a rich time of nurturing and love as we became a family.

Here we all are in 1994, with our exchange-daughter Anne from Switzerland. Having three sons and female standard poodle I asked specifically for a girl when we entered the AFS exchange program. Anne lived with us for a year, and loved her new brothers while she educated us parents about the ins and outs of having a girl in the house!!! During our next trip to Europe we will visit Anne in Zurich (she still calls us “Mum” and “Dad”).

Now you have guessed correctly, this is my mother, who I don’t look anything like. She was very unhappy with me when I was born because I looked like my father’s mother. Luckily her next baby looked just like her! In our later years we became very close when I helped her overcome some life-long difficulties by encouraging her to talk to a psychologist. Old hurts were healed and she was able to be free and loving in a new way. She had suffered from a frozen heart due to the disappearance of her beloved fiance. Somehow the “pull-up-your-socks-and-get-on-with-it” approach of the 1940’s had not helped her and depression had been the ‘black dog’ of her life. Although she loved my father she had always felt broken, frozen and distant. Here she is very happy with us on a trip to Darwin in 2002.

This is a slightly blurry image of me at the Sydney Opera House, frequently visited while we lived in the greater Sydney area. For many years we went with friends to Sydney Theatre Company productions, rushing into the city together after work, sometimes drinking champagne in the car together, to arrive in time for dinner before the show. We booked at the best places, had so much fun, saw a marvelous show and drove back out to our acres on the fringes of the city. It was a high time!  Now there are only three of us, since Neil died two weeks ago after a short battle with a brain tumor.

In 2007 we had a lot of fun with our youngest son and his wife in New York … here they are on the subway … now they live in Paris so we have to go that way instead.

Here is eldest son and his family enjoying Easter with us, so we made a sign and sent a message to youngest son and his wife who were overseas!

And here is middle son marrying his lady, the awesome mother of his daughter Edwina. So many wonderful memories of a long life, and a few of the significant people who have passed through.