Our memories should be the starting point of our present - but we can't live lost in our memories - we must make new ones by walking new paths through our life journey....

Memories

The invitation arrived in the mail last week announcing this years Christmas Cookie Exchange - a day that was set aside each December to make Christmas memories with the children, joining in the sharing of cookies made lovingly by each family involved - a day  that started a tradition many years ago, created by herself and her two sisters when the youngest grandchild was just a toddler - but a day that she was no longer able to participate in as she had been lost - left afloat - by consequences unfairly issued by those who had chosen to be non accepting and judgmental of the circumstances she now faced.   

She had always believed that they would all be bound together for life - that they were all attached by invisible threads of string to a main spool of collective memory - a mass that represented the first conscious recall of everyone in her family -  the way she had often seen nursery school children on a class trip - string had been pulled through the sleeves of their jackets to keep them from getting lost. She wanted to believe that when they moved they were forced to be aware of each other and grateful to not be alone.

She did not like to be alone. She never had, and so had diligently worked towards building a strong family and an extended family unit where she and her children and their aunts and uncles and cousins could share each others life journeys in a circle of unconditional love and acceptance, no matter their differences of opinion, or lifestyles, or choices, or circumstances. But now she saw with alarming clarity what she had avoided facing since she first began collecting memories and now she had to face the reality that families were not always forever.

If she had really been able to separate all the moments in her, to memory, she would have seen herself surrounded by a unified family as they moved through each others lives.  But  realistically, she could see that, after all, she had really always been alone. Yet, for whatever unexplainable reason, some part of her still naively wanted to hang onto the string that should keep them together - to pull the string taut around all the people she loved and never let go......