Letting Go

Letting Go

Once my grandfather passed away, nothing was the same. The old tractor he had parked in the low pasture one last time, stayed exactly where he left it. The barn, stables and paddocks became chipped, warped and began to tumble down over time. The old round pen that we spent countless summer hours training colts in - all but stumps and fallen posts now. The herd of horses he worked so hard to build, has slowly dwindled in size. But, the cats are still there, and the hay still comes to the barn for stocking every summer. The few old mares that remain still find their way out to the pastures - and every spring, we are greeted with the fresh curiosity of young colts and their dewy noses. There are still some family members there and they keep a few things moving. It's just not the same. I was reminded on my most recent visit, that I drove those highways countless times growing up with my parents - holidays, special events - the common visit. I remember my grandfather's old doctor bag tucked away in his room, the well tended fruit trees, fixing row after row of fence line, plucking the heads off of the thistles (for which we received a nickel a-piece!) the home made ice cream that he ‘approved’ of because it was made with honey, not sugar, and countless other treasures. As an adult, sometimes nostalgia tugs at me to go back, to revisit. He was a great icon, my grandfather - doctor (healer), man of faith with a persistent calm and devotion to God, family and country that seems to have all but died out in the people of younger generations.

These four Polaroids are from a collection of 20 that I titled, 'Letting Go'. For me, these pictures represent embracing the present reality of these memories - and the tension between how different it is now, and how sweet it was. This room in my heart, the one carved out for this specific place and all that goes with it, is now retained to memory. Just as the house that heard generations of children's laughter stands empty and quiet now, so does my heart in this place. I wanted to catalog, in pictures, the contrast between what I see in my heart and what is truly in the present. This contrast being my attempt to display how still, aged and forgotten things are now, but how alive and vibrant they were when I was a child. I wanted to let the evolution of this place soak in....and the memories that insist things should be the way they 'were', quiet for a while - long enough to drink in the beauty of life having passed, grown still and moved along.