Things Forgotten

This morning I woke up feeling miserable. This cold is hanging on no matter how hard I fight it. The sore throat has given way to congestion.
Everyone in my family gets rather over protective of me when I get a cold as I have had pneumonia 5 times and the last two times were pretty scary. Came close to loosing my life so everyone worries at the first sign of any congestion in me. I tend to not worry about it all. So by orders from just about everyone, I have had to stay put.
Its one of those foggy days that begs to have the land explored. The pictures here will prove I did not stay inside like my loved ones suggest I do. Never was very good at being obedient about staying put.
But there is with in me some strong need to capture what I see each day in photos. Just the way the dead leaves lay dark and wet on the green grass, or the sadness of a dried up weed, trying so hard to be beautiful still in the winter time of grayness.
Today, Tuk Tuk was a bit of a pest. He was actually, literally, in between my feet for every step I took. If I bent over to take a picture, his little sweet face was looking up at me through the lens. He seemed just as interested in each thing I looked . But, as cute as he is, I didn't want him in each and every picture taken. If that wasn't bad enough, here comes miss hen, a very tame one I might add, walking next to me . Tuk Tuk between my feet and miss hen on my left. Stopping when I stopped and walking with me with each step I took. She acted like some well behaved dog that must have graduated from some dog obedience school. Maybe it was the kind of day, or maybe it was a bit of melancholy from being under the weather, but as I walked around, camera in hand, I became so serious minded. I saw so many things with memories attached to them. A small wooden pack saddle frame the children made for one of our pack goats. Its in the scrap lumber pile now and looked so forgotten. I wanted to always remember it, never forget the fun that was attached to it, the joy the children had in cutting the wood themselves, figuring out just how to make it fit the goats back, prepare a pad to go under it and the laughter of teaching Jean how to carry his pack. How many funny looks we got when we would take him to the state park hiking with us. No one was quite sure what this dear animal was at first.
A roll of barbed wire sat forgotten, blending into the surroundings. I am not even sure why we bought it, oh yes, I remember, it was purchased after a pack of wild dogs came in and killed some of our goats, my 40th birthday. The local police shot the wild dogs and we felt safe again so didn't add the barbed wire to the existing fence. So there it sits.
I found an old bird nest today, plastic used on the bottom, modern birds it seems. A bit of weatherproofing for the little birds.
Some old picket fence, needing paint, part of Fergus MacSnows play area. I still miss my little pal.
It's wonderful how fragments of the past show themselves to us and flood us with memories. When I was about 14 I took pictures of some things around our house. My family thought these photos were less than artistic. It was things such as the hall light, the staircase, the railing on the front porch, some plant urns, cement things, but once when they were empty in the spring, I filled them with tad poles complete with buckets full of their own water. You can guess that the water did what water does in cement urns. In no time at all the poor pollywogs were all stuck to the side of the very empty containers. I wanted to remember that tragic moment of my childhood. I had cried for hours thinking about how I killed those little wiggly frogs to be.Now, looking back over those photos no one sees them as silly as they did then. They are filled with memories for my sisters and I. We can remember going up and down those stairs for so many reasons. Coming down them dressed all fancy for a date, going up them mad at the world as teenagers often are.
We can almost feel the cold of that metal railing once again in seeing the photo I took of it. Radiators where winter mittens dried, felting a bit, their long strings hanging like garland but making me mad I had to have one on my mittens, no one else did among my friends. But then my mother and grandmother were old fashioned and as an adult, how I love that they were.
Ordinary things with extraordinary memories of the ordinary.
Take time to snap some pictures of the ordinary in your life, at some point they will bring extraordinary memories back to life.