Portraits on a Wall...

We're told that “you can never go back again” but of course we do it all the time. In dreams, both waking and sleeping, we return to places we’ve been... I think maybe people like to say it can’t be done as just another caution to make the most out of today. Carpe Diem! I’m fine with knowing that this present moment is actually creating the memories we’ll return to in the future anyway. But the strange thing is that although we all age and change dramatically, we do so accompanied by objects that travel in time with us, often unfazed by the passing years.

I have a small piece of scrimshawed walrus tusk that I bought for twenty five cents half a century ago from the boy who lived across the street from our house . My “I like Ike” campaign button, a gift from a great Aunt, nests with a lot of not so important papers in a fireproof box under the clothes hanging in my bedroom closet. 
A hollow gourd with an intricately carved ivory top sits on my dresser. It was used in 19^th century Japan as a cricket cage and somehow made its way across the globe to rest atop a mantle on Fonaine’s porch in Gordonsville. Then she gave it to me. Copper bowls from Sophie Ferguson, a close friend of my parents many years ago, hang in my kitchen facing an elaborate silver cocktail shaker that Ernest Brown had made in Mexico to give to my parents as a wedding present.

Grandpa Maverick still proclaims his love for Grandma on a small copper plate mounted inside the lid of the chest he carved for her. It reads: “To Ruth with love, at the beginning of our 78^th year and the 54^th of our marriage. George Madison Maverick 8-11-1970”. I’m in awe of that chest and remember well the summer I spent in Charlottesville when he carved it. We all know the picture of Grandpa sitting in his chest on the front walk at Shepherds Hill Farm. In the background the brass bell hanging from the pole was so pitted with acne scars from the BB bullets we shot to make the bell sing that it looked like the surface of the moon. One day Ruth will own that chest and it will conjure different memories for her, and eventually for her own children.

These family touchstones mark our lives as physical reminders of who we are and where we’ve been. In many ways they are better than pictures, as they spark memories of places they themselves have inhabited. They connect us to the past and continue beyond our own lives into the lives of our families yet unborn.

Such is the case with the portraits of Jesse Pitman Lewis and his wife, two of my fifth Great Grandparents. Painted in 1852, we have an old newspaper photograph somewhere of Great Grandpa Maverick inside his house on Sunshine Ranch. In the background of the photo, Jesse and his wife stare out from the living room wall. Now, three generations later, they will be the silent observers on my own wall. 

I'm just a caretaker as these things travel through time, gathering stories, known and unknown, along the way.