Lost in Space . . . and Time

My to-do list for today is quite long, and most of it really does need to be done today. It's all work-related, mostly grading and planning. Instead of tending to it, I've been cleaning my room, washing clothes, and -- most ridiculous of all -- spending hours on a website I discovered this morning. The site has pictures of a place where I spent my weekends and summers as a kid, and later lived for twenty-five years before moving to Florida. I spent three hours looking at over seven hundred photos, some with people I recognized and many with people I didn't. I just couldn't pull myself away, and for those few hours I was transported back to the seventies. There are pictures from later decades as well, but the seventies pics were the ones that most interested me. I think it was in 1976 that my family bought a little cabin. The cabin grew over the years into the house my brother and I inherited from my mom. Some of the photos on the site are from my mother's back yard, pool party-jams over many years. Some are from parties at my house, which was about two miles "down-mountain" from my mom's house.

While some of the pictures made me smile or even laugh, most of them just made me sad. Nearly all of the people in the pictures are gone now, if not from the world at least from my world. There are some with whom I am still in touch, and I suppose I should focus more on that. I don't even know if the sense of sadness I felt had to do with the loss of the people; it may have been more a feeling of losing a better, more innocent time. Having it preserved in photos is good, I guess, but because I'm not big on nostalgia, the photos mostly depress me. And still I couldn't look away. In fact, I still have the site open in another tab. I had to make myself stop looking so I could get things done. I posted a picture below, but I'm not sure you'll be able to see it. My first wedding took place in the ballroom of the clubhouse pictured (the big area on the left); on the day of my second wedding, the entire clubhouse burned to the ground. All that remains is the brick and block foundation. Weird, eh?