To Orphan Our Ancestors
They flutter from my fingers back into the plastic stacking boxes, into the piles of photos just like them; old, scalloped-edged, mounted, unmounted, large and small, some the size of a tiny postcard. They are sepia, black or color, the color faded and soft, all but the reds gone. These are the ancestors that nobody wants. Smiles or stern faces alike, their nicely pressed Sunday dresses, their starched, uncomfortable collars, all of those cracked and aging pieces of heritage drop into sad little clumps and clusters in the bin, just like living blood clotting and settling, dying. All hearts stop beating some day, and these are no different.
What is different here is how those granddads and grandmas, memaws and papaws, omas and opas have been forgotten, orphaned, left crying voiceless into the wind of history. The images of morfar and mormor, mother’s father, mother’s mother, reach out to me with bloodless limbs. These images of lives well or poorly lived settle reluctantly into dusty, smelly, insignificant piles. These images are shoveled into the back reaches of the estate liquidation store where the miscellaneous shreds and tatters of ordinary lives find what passes for rest. They lie there like the piles of drying fall leaves I raked last Saturday, exuding the acrid scent of paper mold and faint traces of photographic chemicals a hundred years dried.
What did those proud young parents think so long ago when they searched the eyes of the fat, pink-cheeked baby in his christening gown? Did they think ninety years or so down the road to when that former baby’s aging eyes might blur with tears as he pointed to their own portraits, not discarded as the ones I see here, but preserved in a fine leather album with black pages? Did they envision their son whispering to his own progeny, “Those were my parents; they made me everything I am”? Did they think of the covenant of faith passed down, father to son, to son, to son?
Perhaps they only thought about this moment; most folks do. The baby’s chin needed wiping; the photographer was waiting. “Mildred, come hold your brother while mama gets him a cloth.” They were too busy to think five minutes down the road, yet alone ninety years.
I start pulling out the ones whose expressions tug on my heartstrings most strongly. I sort the photos into a spare chronology .Why all these likenesses of nice folks, city folks, hill folk, why all these light-eyed people lying here in faded, forgotten stacks?
There are fewer pictures of babies as time goes on and fewer families with more than two toddlers. The gentle albumen prints and dark tintypes line up next to crisp black and whites, and the number of children gets fewer and fewer. The fifties still show two kidlets, the ideal family, replacement value, no more. As the color photos dominate and the sixties and seventies pile up in my little timeline I find many photos of one child. She is precious because there is just one, like a jewel.
But it is 2007, and Precious, child of the sixties, doesn’t care. On her third divorce or fourth live-in, she never quite remembered to have kids, and when she did it was too late. So when mom and dad passed away it was too much to deal with, all that stuff. The furniture, the pictures; especially the pictures. She never could quite bear being the end of the line. So she picked up the phone and called Estate Liquidators. Yes, the entire estate. No, she didn’t want to sort out any mementoes. Who would she leave them to anyway?
She really didn’t mean to cry when the truck came to box up and cart off her parents’ stuff.
But there was no one left to care, no one to share the memories with.
It was best this way.
I finish creating my stacks and cart them up to the cash register. The owner of the store always gives me a good deal, and a strange look.
“My orphans,” I say.
“Didn’t know somebody’s old folks could be orphaned. Kinda backwards, if you ask me.” She snaps her gum. “Too bad their kids don’t care,” she adds.
“Indeed. Or it could be they just weren’t there.”
All hearts stop beating some day, but some never start.
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