Time Machines

    I was wandering about my in-laws' cleaned-up, mostly emptied-out, soon-to-be-on-the-market house (see posts from 2/7/2016 - 2/10/2016), giving it a last once-over, 

...when I noticed on some left-behind shelves next to one of the beds a couple of rows of old photo albums. 

     I pulled out a stack of albums, sat on the bed,  and started looking at the pictures,

.. of people I knew, people I didn't know,

...my kids,

...and other peoples' kids.

      After a while Tom came into the bedroom looking for me.
      "Who's getting the photo albums?"  I asked him.
      "Those go to Mary Jane,"  he replied, referring to his sister.
        At that moment  Mary Jane entered the bedroom. "Are you getting the photo albums?"  I asked her.
        "No, Donald gets those,"  said Mary Jane, referring to one of their other brothers.
         A little later Donald came into the bedroom.  "You're getting the photo albums, then?"  I asked him.
        "Me?"  Donald asked.  "Gee, I don't know...does anybody else want them?"
         "I do!"  said I. 
         I asked if I could have the albums, at least for a while,  until someone else wanted them.
         No one objected.
         When we returned home laden with the photo albums,

…which are still sitting on the buffet (or whatever this eclectic piece of second-hand furniture sitting in my living room is called),

…Tom mused that photographs are really of interest only to the people who snapped them and  maybe to the next generation or two because after that nobody knows anymore – or subsequently cares about – the people or places in the pictures.       

      Tom's right, of course.

     Not that there don't exist old photographs of archival quality or of interest  to genealogists, but these are the exceptions among the albums or boxes or – from now on - memory cards and laptops full of unremarkable photos that end up being left-overs of peoples’ ordinary lives.

     Still, for those of us who’ve lived for many rotations of the earth around the sun, our old photos are little time machines taking us back to the younger times of  the people we know or knew,

...those we care or cared about,

...ourselves,

…and we look and look at these younger times, transfixed by the bittersweet wonder of it all.