More Than

I knew when I left New York, the pictures must come with me.

And so they did, but no longer did they have the comfortable home they once shared.

No longer did they sit on the roll top desk that my husband loved so much nor gaze down at me as I sat in his leather chair.

No, they were unpacked in a lovely but small one bedroom apartment that had not an iota of space for either the roll top desk or the well worn leather chair.

Eventually I became realistic and through the blessings of the internet shopped for a new home for my links to memory lane. And voila through the resources of Pottery Barn discovered the solution......shelves.

With the expertise of Randy, who is an in-house miracle worker, the shelves were quickly installed. My pictures now stand rigidly and gaze down at me nightly.

One of them is my high school yearbook photo. My daughter had resurrected it years ago and had it framed along with a picture of her Dad in his Marine Corps. uniform. At that point in time we had never met and the odds of it ever happening were quite remote.

Although both of us were New York natives, I was a Manhattanite, and he, lived in a suburb of Queens county. The twain rarely met. We had no common relatives, or friends or links that would have brought us into even remote contact.

Yet it happened four years after the pictures were taken. I will ever and always believe it was one of God’s incredible miracles. Also, one that blessed my life for close to sixty years as we both grew older and occasionally, wiser.

However, nightly now as I look at the pictures, when I view the young 16 year old high school senior, I see someone I had almost forgotten. She seems to have more hair than face, and I still wonder why she ever bought that blouse.

Then my gaze crosses to the other side of the shelf and I see a young man eager to serve his country. He is still unscarred by the horrors of war and the future anguish of the loss of friends.

I see innocence in both faces, and then I vaguely remember youth. As my gaze travels across the shelves, I see our four children. Then I realize the other miracles we were both granted.

The pictures and the shelves are mere instruments. With precision they lead me back daily to the wonders of the life two very young people were blessed to know and the miracles of the love they shared.

Everyday I am thankful I remembered to bring the pictures.