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(Written January 1, 2019, on Facebook):

Visited with my cousin Laura today. Haven’t seen her in two years.

She’s an artist, like me. And, she’s a Slifer. So it was a good day of talking and catching up and knowing our shared family traits and history. We Slifer’s seem to be attached to our sentimental things…our homes are filled with knick knacks and other items that tell the story of our lives. Like little markers left along a trail both Laura and I gather sentimental souvenirs of sorts.

Recently she and her husband moved out their home on the shore of Kent Island, MD – Love Point in Stevensville – a home that has held so many, many memories between her and I since they moved there around 1983. The home is for sale and there are all those last little things left inside….I was so glad I got to go inside and kinda say goodbye to this home today. It was very emotional for me, too. Laura is the closest to a sister I will ever have.

I asked if she had taken any photos inside of it empty and she had not. So I did snap some for her, and for me. Here are a few. I asked if there was any little item laying around that she planned to throw away that I would like to have something. But of course, nothing she planned to keep. As we walked through we were standing up in the “tower” that had been her painting room – it was empty but she grabbed a little clock-in-a-box off the window ledge and said to take that. She had used it in her studio as her time keeper.

When we were back at their new home, I photographed our hands holding it. On my drove back to Newark I was thinking of the song “The Hands of Time.”

“The Hands of Time”
If the hands of time
Were hands that I could hold,
I’d keep them warm and in my hands
They’d not turn cold.
Hand in hand we’d choose
The moments that should last.
The lovely moments that
Should have no future and no past.
The summer from the top of the swing,
The comfort in the sound of a lullaby,
The innocence of leaves in the spring,
But most of all the moment
When love first touched me!
All the happy days
Would never learn to fly,
Until the hands of time
Would choose to wave Goodbye.

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February 10, 2022

I am preparing to visit my cousin, Laura, tomorrow through Monday. It has been a bit over three years since I’ve seen her, and though we talk by phone and text sometimes, it has been just too long since I’ve been with her.

Whenever I travel, I feel stress before and after, because I must consider business projects, animals and much more and make sure I have my suitcase and other things ready for the experience. This can feel daunting but is essential. I’m thinking of an old podcast that came to mind, “Making Room for the Immensities” by Rob Bell. It just popped into my mind as I was thinking that this trip down nostalgia lane is a form of essential work – at least in my world – to prepare myself for a face-to-face reconnection with such a dear soul and family member, the closest I have to any “kinfolk” sister, being an only child. I am hoping this will be the beginning of regular visits. She really isn’t too far away now, about 2.5 hour drive…but after all the upheavals in my life and also with the pandemic, it has just been very difficult to carve out the time to go there.

I am getting very excited to see her.

I don’t recall every part of the podcast linked above, only I liked it enough to think of the title. I should listen to it again, maybe tonight while cleaning up or something.

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I started this post with what I wrote on Facebook the last visit I had with her, which was around New Year’s Day, 2019. I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams what would unfold later that year in my life, and she was also in the midst of life changes with the sale of their home and an upcoming move.

She was finishing up cleaning out the home on Kent Island which I had visited her and their family at going back to around 1985 or so, the year Jim and I married. As she and I took a drive over for her to do some things (after meeting and eating at a restaurant for lunch), I had the privilege of walking through this sacred space one last time with her. At one point I became emotional (in an artistic way) because I wanted to remember and photograph, for her and for me, what I saw through my eyes.

I actually remember becoming a little spontaneously bold and directive – as one can only do with someone they intimately know – saying to Laura along the lines, “I want to photograph you in front of the door…no…not there…step back into the house…”

When we drove over there, I hadn’t planned to take the photographic images in this way.

Hesitantly, at first, she posed and I took the first photo…and then, we walked through the rooms and outside and I photographed these cherished images.

I wanted to capture seeing her come to the door to let me into her home upon arriving for a visit…

In my world, there are photos, and then there are images.

Just like in cinematography…there are movies and then there are, films…

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Images are that which get burned into our mind’s eye in some way...or that which a person sees in some situation that goes beyond what is there.

One of my favorite scenes in the film Saving Private Ryan is when Ryan asks if it is true that the Captain was a high school English teacher (before he found himself in this horrific War). Young Ryan tells the Captain he can’t picture the images of his brother’s faces in his mind’s eye…and the Captain tells him he needs to think of some other (indirect) context. He mentions thinking of home…of his hammock in the yard and his wife pruning rose bushes wearing his gloves… They go on in this dialogue and then, after Ryan tells the story of the last night he was with his brothers, then asks the Captain to tell him more about his wife and the rose bushes. Painfully, the Captain shakes his head and says, staring, “No. That one I save just for me.” This all takes place shortly before the bridge scene when the Captain dies.

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When I walked through my cousin’s home with her back in January 2019, I saw, along with her, over thirty-five years of life being lived and comings and goings. I saw weekend trips with my first husband before we had kids, I saw boat trips with Captain Harry (ha…that was the time when Jim smoked a cigar with him and Tilghman and got seasick…those were fun times!…Laura was pregnant with Frances and I remember someone decided we couldn’t sleep on that boat all night and she and I, and William, were taken to a local “cushy” motel! Oh those were the days…).

I saw in my mind’s eye… William as a toddler, and the birth of Frances, then Zach, then Jonathan, then Andrew…with the Slifer cradle being passed back and forth between our homes.

I saw summer days, picnics, Easters, Thanksgivings, Christmases…I saw my baby shower for Zach and visits there with Aunt Virginia and Uncle Bill. I saw bringing Jonathan there as a baby and later, many overnight visits with him and Andrew playing together and tucking him into the other bed in Andrew’s room at night…I saw a visit there for several days when I was very distressed in 2003 with trying to figure things out…I saw Tilghman’s studio and the big freezer for fishing charter boat cooking and I remember the time shortly after my first divorce when I was cooking a lot of soups with meat chunks and leftovers and Zach, a growing boy of sixteen, said to me, “Can we have some MEAT more?!”

Ha. I told Zach, “There IS meat in the soup,” and he said, “I mean like a whole SLAB of meat!”

A few days later I remember driving a bunch of framed art back down to Tilghman and him saying, “How are things going?”

I told him that Zach wanting “slabs” of meat, ha ha ha!

He said, “I will send you home with MEAT!” He took me in that studio garage and opened the deep chest freezer and fill up bags of older rockfish, duck, geese, venison and other odds and ends of stuff…bluefish probably…

I also remember in 2010 when some painting rags with turpentine spontaneously caught fire and part of the study burned. The house, thankfully, was untouched.

OK. No I didn’t see all that at once – it was just too immense – but I think I felt it in my heart, intellectually…and so I created some images and a video…

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Below I will share the images photographed that day…and then a few I took from photo albums a half hour ago…just random ones I could easily find from those early times of our lives.

I am thinking now of a line that really struck me my senior year of high school English from an assigned reading called A Separate Peace:

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” (from A Separate Peace, by John Knowles)

In some sense, this seems to be a companion quotation to another I really like that I seem to find myself quoting with repetition over the last several years: